Tuesday 19 November 2013

A Little Beauty

For some reason, my alarm clock didn't go off this morning - but in the event this malfunction gifted me a walk through the park (to catch a later train at a different station). A glorious late autumn morning it was too, with blue skies and dazzling sun - and there, in the bend of the river, close by the path, a snow-white Little Egret. I've written before about my encounters with egrets (egrets, I've had a few...), but usually this elegant bird is keeping its distance, standing apart from the other birds, ready to take flight at any moment. This one, however, was consorting happily with a bunch of park mallards and showed not the slightest anxiety as I walked past, within a few yards. It seems that, like the heron before it, the egret is turning domestic, adapting to a suburbia where there is nothing to fear from us humans - except perhaps getting hit on the head by a stray piece of bread. Well, each one of these fine birds is a welcome splash of heart-lifting beauty.

3 comments:

  1. The Great Egret is certainly a suburban resident over here in Virginia. To be seen every day in ponds and drainage ditches everywhere almost equal in numbers to the herons. I'm almost getting used to it. But now the ospreys perched on lampposts and the pelicans flying alongside me as I cross the James River... those still amaze me every day.

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  2. Ospreys, pelicans - wow... Don't think we'll ever have those in London, but who knows? We'd have said the same about cormorants a few decades ago, not to mention peregrine falcons. Red Kites cld be the next arrival - they're spreading fast - and buzzards...

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    1. I understand the Red Kite experiment has been a tremendous success. I've seen pictures of Kites from Yorkshire in the past year. It would be nice to see the same done for the osprey. If theres enough fish to feed all those bloody cormorants there must be enough for ospreys too.

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