Author: David

In the distance, I saw two coots. One had fluffy infant down, clearly a chick despite now being grown to adult size. The other was in silhouette. I assumed it was one of the parent birds. Coot adults invest a lot of parental care. They share brooding duties on the unhatched eggs, and both of them carry on feeding their chicks even when the young have grown to full size, and look like they should be able to (and indeed do) get their own food.

I moved somewhat nearer to try to get a better angle to picture them from. As I focussed the camera, the previously silhouetted bird dived. When it surfaced, vegetation in its beak, I could see that it too was a chick. Instead of eating the food itself, it immediately gave it to the other chick, passing it from beak to beak in the way a parent normally would.

For several years, the pond slider turtle has had a solitary existence in the lake at West Park. On some warm days in spring and summer, it emerged and is still emerging to spend hours on a fallen tree trunk, basking in the sun.

We were surprised last month. There’s a second tree trunk, lying end to end with the one favoured by the pond slider. One morning, the pond slider was in its favourite spot. At the far end of the second fallen log there was a second turtle.

This one was somewhat smaller. Like the original, those parts of its skin visible peeking out of the carapace had yellow streaks, but making distinctly different patterns. The newcomer is a yellow-bellied slider: one of the two sub-species found in addition to the standard members of the type.

The bird is tiny, despite the image being heavily cropped. Even though I know where it is, I find it hard to spot as its plumage merges with the varying dark tones of the shadows and lichens of the tree trunk (it’s very near the centre of the image).

It’s a treecreeper, creeping up one of the trees in West Park. The bird’s presence had first been disclosed by the song recognition function of the Merlin app on a smartphone.

A turtle suns itself on a fallen log by one of the islands in West Park lake. It’s been IDed on iNaturalist as a pond slider, a species native to northern Mexico and southern U.S.  They are common pets, and too commonly abandoned in ponds and pools.

We first spotted this one in the spring of 2020, spending hours basking in the sun on hot days. It’s been in very much the same area on hot days every year since; more regularly in some years than others. People have told us it was already an established resident for a few years before we first noticed it.

Hanging over the water from the canal at Compton, a hemlock water dropwort, looking like its flowers were about to open.

Often when plants have common names ending in wort, it’s because they used to be thought to have medicinal properties. Commonly, this was wecause of some supposed resemblance to some body part: bladderwort, liverwort, toothwort. Not a mistake to be made with this plant

A female mallard with three ducklings on the canal at Compton in the middle of last month. The ducklings looked very young and small, probably hatched earlier that morning.

The small number of ducklings and the seeming lack of caution of the mother letting them swim close to the canal-side footpath as people and dogs passed close by meant we suspected this may have been her first ever brood.