While waiting for R in Stratford this afternoon, I wandered down to the river in the hope of photographing a bird or six – but just as I arrived, so did an unforecast rainstorm. Even without the rain it had been a cold and windy day, and the addition of a large quantity of cold water, driven diagonally by the wind, didn’t improve matters at all. Town felt like a long way away at this point, so I took shelter under the heaviest conifer in the Bancroft Gardens, tucked my camera as far under my coat as I could get it, hunched over, put up my hood, and endured.
It took about fifteen minutes for the storm to go far enough over to entice me back out into the open, and even then it was still raining. But I was very wet by now, and very cold, and very cross, and I needed to walk, fast, to at least warm myself up, so I grabbed a few water-on-a-duck’s-back shots of some Mallards, then stomped across the Old Tramway Bridge and headed west along the river towards Old Town, where I’d parked the car. I was still walking fast, and probably muttering rude things about weather forecasters, when I reached the basin between the weirs and Lucy’s Mill Bridge, and happened on a couple of Cormorants. I promptly threw my bum into reverse and screeched to a halt, but not fast enough to avoid putting them up: they both took off, circled the basin, and flew back along the river towards the theatre. I was livid by now (though, on the plus side, warm), but after a few seconds of vibrating with indecision on the spot while calculating the relative likelihoods of catching up with the birds, getting rained on again, and scoring a parking penalty, I about-turned and yomped back the way I’d come.
When I got level with the theatre I discovered both Cormorants – an adult in breeding plumage, and a first winter bird – calmly swimming around and diving for fish, on the opposite side of the river, just off the Bancroft wharf. I grabbed some photos and then set off for the Old Tramway Bridge, hoping to get round to the Bancroft (where I’d sheltered from the rain half an hour earlier, if you can still remember the start of this saga) before something scared them and they took flight again. And then, half way across the bridge, this: the older bird of the two, sitting on the sign for the Cox’s Island Nature Reserve, holding out its wings to dry them, and completely ignoring all the people passing to and fro across the bridge – many of whom were stopping close by its perch to point at, discuss, and film it. You still wouldn’t describe it as confiding, but given how antsy and flighty Cormorants normally are in the presence of humans, this is a remarkable level of habituation. The bird retained its disdainful attitude right through my own photo shoot, and my last view of it – still on the same perch – was from river level, through one of the arches of the bridge, as I walked away towards Old Town.
R: L2, C4, D8.
