Wolves Wild

I haven’t been having my usual occasional visits to West Park this summer. The tsunami of heatwaves meant that staying indoors in the cool was advisable for someone of my age and various medical conditions. When the long dry spell gave way to a series of torrential downpours, the conditions were still less than inviting for having gentle strolls in the fresh air.

A visit in May, before the great heat, showed one pair of swans resident on the lake. They seemed to be having difficulties controlling the fast and erratic movements of three tiny bundles of fluff, cygnets looking like they were very recently hatched. Perhaps they were keen to explore their new surroundings. They were zooming to put as much space as they could between themselves, their siblings and their parents.

Our next visit was in late August, with the cormorants, herons and tufted ducks. The cygnet numbers had now fallen to two (I had been expecting more losses). The two were approaching the size of their mother, with their juvenile down beginning to give way to white feathers.

But they were still keeping their distance from each other.

Two of the handful of tufted ducks which stay resident on West Park lake over the summer – the numbers usually swell, perhaps to around twenty or thirty, over the winter.

Somewhat closer views of the recent cormorants in West Park. Cormorants aren’t regular fixtures on the lake. They tend to show up perhaps two or three times a decade, rest and have a good feed for a few days or a few weeks, then move on. This group is bigger than usual, and also broke the regular pattern by arriving as summer is giving way to autumn.

The two herons which recently ended up in residence on the West Park lake. They’ve based themselves one to each island on the lake. So one of them has adopted a perch close to those of the cormorants, while the other has opted for a relatively quieter spot, sharing only with a gull.

Cormorants dive for fish, but they don’t have water-repellent feathers unlike some diving birds. After a plunge, they need to hold out their wings to let them dry.

The young cormorant was standing still, wings stretched for a while. The Canada goose behind it was having a short sharp shake. Despite appearances, one bird was not copying the stance of the other.

Towards the end of the patch of late August rainstorms, visitors to West Park lake possibly taking refuge from the weather. When we saw them there were two herons, though only one features in this series of pictures. The five (possibly six) cormorants may have been a family group: there were two adults and the rest were juveniles.