“I’m going to carry my umbrella,” said R, getting ready to charge off into Stratford at cardio exercise speed. “That way, I can be certain I won’t need it.”
Hmmm. It sounded a bit Winnie-the-Pooh to me. Only quite a bit less amusing, given that I found myself being rained on almost as soon as I set off on my own, more sedate walk along the river. When R and I met at BTP, forty minutes later, I said, “I’m going to give your umbrella talisman 1/10, for a purely token effort. It did actually stop raining, but not till I was half way up Henley Street, by which point I was soaked.”
After Friday’s encounter I’d been hoping, and half expecting, to see at least one Cormorant on my way into town, but Cormorant was there none, and even the Black-headed Gulls had taken themselves off somewhere with better weather. So I was left with a pretty poor choice of subjects to photograph, and I arrived at the café with only a Mallard and a busker on camera. Luckily though, as we headed back to the car after lunch we spotted the mature Cormorant swimming near the RSC gardens, and I was able to catch up with it and grab some images at the chain ferry landing.
Up on the Old Tramway Bridge on Friday, a woman asked me what the bird was that was sitting on the nature reserve sign, and when I told her it was a Cormorant she said she’d never seen one before, and asked if it was normal to find them in an urban environment like Stratford. I gave her a fifteen-second précis of the differing habits of European and British Cormorants, and the fact that the natives are apparently now adopting Continental manners, but without going into any details of the ‘carbo’ and ‘sinensis’ races. You and I are now fully trained though, and one look at that square patch of yellow skin on this bird’s lower jaw has told us that it’s a member of the tree-living, angler-annoying, European subspecies – Phalacrocorax carbo sinensis.
R: L2, C4, D10.
