Category: David

Can you spot the Mediterranean gull in these pictures? If you do so, you might also guess from its position in the frame that you are doing better than I was when I took these shots: hint – look in the left.

It was among a group of black-headed gulls on the RSPB Bowling Green reserve. As the pictures show, “black-headed gull” is yet another of those vernacular misnomers for a bird species. Their head feathers (breeding season only) are dark brown. Only one bird in these pictures is actually black-headed: it’s the med gull.

A Topsham garden gate with a variant of the usual message,

Two moorhen chicks explore flattened reeds on the RSPB Bowling Green Reserve, apparently watched over by a mallard mother. The mallard’s own pair of ducklings and the mother moorhen were on the far shore of this narrow stretch of water when I took these pictures.

A line of tracks in the soft mud of the Exe estuary, left exposed by the ebbing tide.

A godwit stands at the edge of one of the pools in the RSPB Bowling Green Marsh reserve, carefully preening. Behind it, several of the mallards lying ashore keep busy with the same task.

The Exe estuary is littered with the wrecks of boats in all states of disintegration, which now serve as look-out points for the birds of the estuary and as food for they microorganisms which are the agents of their decay.

These ended up by the Turf, a pub located by the lock where the Exeter Canal starts from the tidal stretch of the estuary. It will originally have had what’s likely to have been a roaring trade from boat crews waiting for the right time of tide to use the lock between canal and river, and is now popular with people who have used the network of footpaths and cyclepath for an excursion through the five miles or so from Exeter city centre.