Thursday 21 November 2013

The Jays seem to have finished burying this year's heavy crop of acorns, and a fair number are turning up to be fed peanuts. Here one looks expectantly at me with a sharp grey eye.


If you put a peanut on the fence, the Jay slams down, grabs it and departs in a fraction of a second, a notoriously unphotographable event. It doesn't matter, though, because they look much better perched in trees waiting for the human to stop taking pictures and get on with feeding them.

Although Jays remember the location of thousands of nuts they have cached, presumably a few acorns must be forgotten and survive to sprout, so these birds must be an important propagator of the oak tree.

Various birds were doing their bit to propagate the yew by eating its berries. Here it was the turn of a female blackbird.


Blackbirds and other thrushes like to keep their distance from their own kind, and there are never more than two in this medium-sized bush at once, while others wait their turn on the neighbouring trees. But when the gregarious Starlings come to feed here, they pile in all over the bush.

The female Tawny Owl came out a little farther along her branch in the beech tree, giving us a better look as this elegant bird than we have had for a while.


A Pied Wagtail was exploring the dead leaves on the shore of the Serpentine.


They don't turn the leaves over as some birds do, but rush around looking for small creatures that have incautiously come out into plain sight.

In the Serpentine, a young Herring Gull was enjoying a wash.

No comments:

Post a Comment