Some ducks are at home high in trees. But others tend to stay near to ground level when they are on dry land. Mallards are of this latter type.
This female mallard was perching right at the top of one of the bushes by the lake in West Park. Between thei height of the bush itself and the steep shore, she was a good ten feed above the water she was looking out over.
From the same magnolia which featured in a post yesterday, the flowers now opened and at least one having been fertilised already.
A pair of ravens in the air over West Park. Not sure exactly what they were doing, but they weren’t just passing over. These shots span a ten minute period where I saw them first from one spot, then later from elsewhere. On the second sighting, they seemed to be circling one of the islands.
Don’t look too closely, and the texture is more like the back of some small furry mammal than something from the plant kingdom. Actually, they are the buds of magnolia flowers, just about to open.
I didn’t notice it arrive, but a second parakeet joined the female at the top of one of the West Park trees [yesterday’s post]. Whether the angle was better or more light was on it, but it was possible to see this one’s red “collar” on its neck feathers: it was a male. It almost immediately began courting the first arrival. He appeared to preen some of her head feathers, and did pluck some of the leaf buds from the tree, feeding them to her, repeating this several times.
We thought it was likely that they would begin mating. But we left them to it, thinking that would be more likely if they didn’t have an audience. Instead we walked around the lake and, as chance would have it, were in a position to see the cormorant catching and eating a fish [posts earlier this week].
This is yet another small inconspicuous weed with tiny white flowers. This one is a bittercress, possibly wavy bittercress Cardamine flexuosa.