The birds that breed at Slimbridge seem to be having an extremely productive season – there are ducklings and goslings everywhere you look, and even a baby Bittern showed up briefly this morning, according to the daily sightings report on Bluesky. On the Rushy Pen this afternoon there were a pair of Tufted Ducks shepherding some teeny fluff balls around the shallows and playing hell with any other bird that went near them, but gorgeous as the Tiny Tufties were, they were eclipsed in the cuteness stakes by the Avocet chicks that were wandering around the edges of the scrape, practising hunting like the grown-ups. You can barely see it in this frame, but this little predator has a very, very small water snail in its bill. All baby things are cute, of course (though I believe there’s a legal exception for raptor chicks, which tend to look as if they’ve been put together by a trainee from leftover bits of other birds), but if anyone has a cuter baby to hand than this I’d appreciate you not showing it to me, because I’m already in danger of a sweetness overload.
My second photo shows one of the adult Avocets, doing a passable imitation of an interested parent while taking not a blind bit of notice of anything that was going on. There was some pretty sketchy parenting happening all round the place, actually: several of the other adults were asleep, this one didn’t move so much as a feather during the entire time I was in the hide, and the only one that did appear to be keeping half an eye on the youngsters issued a single sharp call – “Tarquin! Stop that NOW!” – and then subsided back into its post-lunch torpor. The chicks, by contrast, were busy, engaged, and organised, and appear to be efficiently raising themselves.
R: L2, C10, D28.
