Pied Wagtail
Today’s trip used underpasses and bridges and cycle tracks and took us to the local post office and the shopping centre. We posted a letter to insure the scooter and then looked at the range of shops available. I resisted the temptation to look in the charity shops and Julia bought some Gregg’s vegan sausage rolls for the freezer. I can’t tell the difference between the normal and the vegan varieties, and am convinced that rather than being a tribute to the vegan variety, it is an indictment of the quality of meat in the standard version. It was a bit like being on a rehabilitation course – first find a Post Office . . .
Rook
We saw the first crocuses of our year and I was able to take some bird photographs. Although it’s a built-up area, the first bird I photographed was a rook, normally a farmland bird. It was stalking the area outside the shops and picking at some food someone had dropped. Sorry to be so vague, but it was difficult to tell what it was. Normally you would expect a crow to be doing this. Rooks are part of the same family but you don’t usually see them acting as urban scavengers.
Rook again
The second bird was a pied wagtail. This wasn’t a surprise as they are always linked with shopping areas and car parks in my mind. They like the warmth and supposedly feed off bits of broken insect that fall from the cars. I’m not sure how accurate that is, as I’m not sure cars kill many insects these days, due to the presence of fewer insects and better aerodynamics. In the old days a drive in the summer countryside would result in a car festooned in insect body parts. This is not the case these days.
Pied Wagtail
The third bird shot is a collared dove. They erupted from Europe in the 1950s – reaching the UK in 1953b and first breeding in 1956. They were still unusual when I was young, but are now regarded as common garden birds. They frequently visit our garden.
Collared Dove
Not far from home we passed by some houses that had large mature trees planted on the land just beyond their garden fences. This seemed to result in better bird life, though at the cost of some worry about falling trees. One of them had a big group of sparrows and some starlings round their feeders. We haven’t seen either species in or garden yet. I’m not 100% sure that I’m bothered about this as they can both be a bit overpowering.
On our return home we saw the kite overhead again and the squirrel on the feeder. It’s having to work hard for the seed these days, so we are letting it feed for a while. When we fill up the feeders we will probably add spice as a deterrent.
Squirrel
Squirrel again
