A weekend at home, with no work, and there haven’t been many of those lately so let’s make the most of it. Though stormier by the evening much of today remained mild and bright, and with colours like these sometimes you may as well just go with the cliched shot.
In recent months the Muscovy duck which has featured several times on this blog has been joined by four more, all said to have escaped (or been deliberately released) from a duck farm nearby — which is probably where the ‘original’ one came from as well, as this species is not native to Europe. However, if there are both boys and girls in the flock now, who knows, perhaps we could start a whole new Yorkshire colony. This is one of the newer ones, taking a drink on a Saturday afternoon.
My knowledge of ornithology is not that fine-tuned, so I can’t identify which of the 40 or so species this is, but it’s definitely a cormorant. I’m travelling again — this is taken in Norway, but not on the sea: instead, this fine specimen was resting on Stavanger’s city centre lake, Breivatnet, which has featured on the blog before.
One day short of three years doing this blog and there’s still some scope for novelty — pretty sure that yesterday’s cover stars were the first cattle to feature and here’s the first fish. It and its fellows live in the garden of my friend Doug, in Wetherby (where we were a year ago today, too).
Maybe it would be a better shot if it was just the tree, or just the gate. But it’s what it is. Last day of a week spent mostly at home.
Ah, free food. Come to daddy.
They’re early this year but then again so has everything been, since February. And who needs barbed wire when you have a stand of brambles to protect your property.
Wandered out this morning on some inconsequential errand or other and took a shot of some random vista with a cat in the middle distance. Said cat then came straight over to me and virtually demanded that I did its close-ups. Well, who am I to refuse.
I said yesterday I was off travelling somewhere, and here I am, on my second visit to Nairobi. It is for work (lucky me), but today was a morning off, so with my colleagues, we visited the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust just outside the city, where there is an orphanage for young and baby elephants. There are around 20 being cared for there, ranging from three months to a few years old. Some of them have lost their mothers to natural causes, but the majority are there because of human depredations. It’s a tourist attraction of course, but a very worthy one. No one needs ivory, for any reason at all.
I like this picture because of the apparently happy smile on the faces of both these youngsters. I was trying to get pictures without the crowd of people in the background (which I was, of course, part of) but here the just-visible heads give it a sense of scale, I think. May these children get the chance to grow to their maturity and live a full and happy life. What more can one ask of any living being.
I like the way this bird (which apparently is a jackdaw, not a rook as I originally identified it) looks aspirational, as if it’s seen something up there and (unlike poor grounded humanity) knows that within a couple of seconds it can reach it. I also like the focus and the lines of the slates below it. All not bad going for 6.45am, the first time I’ve done a shot remotely at this time since November.
I make it there are 20 mallards in this picture, and unless I’m mistaken, every one of them is asleep. Proof of one thing anyway — ducks are sensible creatures, who keep leisurely working hours.
Being 42 