I got another weather surprise today, when a heavy rainstorm came through on what the forecast had promised would be a dry morning. Sigh. It was annoying, obviously, but luckily it didn’t disrupt any garden plans, because I had to go to Stratford in any case. Just as I was getting ready to leave, a Great Spotted Woodpecker turned up at the new peanut feeder I bought last week, and I got some really nice shots of it through the kitchen window, so I havered for a few moments as to whether I should take the camera with me, or make my life simpler by leaving it at home. In the end I took it, because I kew I’d be furious with myself if I saw something worth photographing and didn’t have a camera – and it turned out to be lucky that I did.
When I finished my errand in town I walked down through the Bancroft Gardens to the river, and immediately spotted the adult Cormorant sitting on its favourite perch on the other side of the Old Tramway Bridge, so I scuttled up onto the bridge, snapping away as I walked towards it. It was only when I got fairly close that I realised it had adopted a new perching strategy: up till now I’ve only ever seen it standing on top of the metal sign, which is tricky (and surely painful?) for a bird with large webbed feet, but today it was standing casually and elegantly on one foot on the capped top of the signpost, which looked more secure and quite a bit more comfortable.
I was then approached by a couple who asked me what the bird was, and we had a bit of a chat – they being surprised, as many people are, by the extravagant headgear of what they’d always thought was a drab, black bird – and I’d barely finished telling them that there had been a juvenile on the river as well, which would have allowed them to see the difference between breeding and non-breeding plumage, but that I hadn’t seen the juvenile for a couple of weeks and thought it must now have left… when the adult took off, circled the nature reserve, and came back down right next to the juvenile, who’d been behind us all this time on the river basin by the theatre. Duh.
I spent the next twenty minutes tracking the birds, following along the Bancroft wharf, up onto the theatre boardwalk, and down into the RSC gardens, as they travelled slowly westward, diving repeatedly for food. When I realised that they’d turned and were heading back towards the nature reserve I hurried on ahead, and was sitting on a low wall by the rowing boat jetty when they hove into view. It didn’t take them long to spot me, at which point they moved further away, but by that time I’d already got some good photos from a nice low angle. I think my final photo today, of the two birds together, illustrates the point about the contrast in their plumage quite nicely.
Having decided that I now had all the photos, and all the photos was surely enough photos (at least for one day), I was walking away from the river, when a voice behind me called out, “Excuse me!” I turned to see a man rushing towards me, mentally bet myself a new lens that I knew what he was about to say, and applied a polite smile. “You look as though you know what you’re doing,” he said breathlessly (Bless him!), “so I just wondered if you could tell me – what are those birds?” So off I happily went again: Cormorants… adult… juvenile… breeding plumage… habitat… behaviour… in future, just call me the Stratford Cormorant Correspondent.
Now. About that new lens…
R: L2, C6, D1.
