Birds (as in 🦅🐧🕊🦆🦢🦉🦩🦚🦜🐔 etc)

The park swans have 2 cygnets this year.

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Heard my first reed warbler of the year on Friday down in North Greenwich. Also watched some sand martins and common terns flapping about.

Lovely stuff.

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Just asked station staff to call the RSPCA to help a trapped (Great?) tit in some netting above the tube platform. It’s not trapped as such as pigeons roost there but it didn’t look like it knew where to go.

Made the station staff promise to help it. I’m away for the weekend otherwise I’d check to see it was ok. Poor bird :frowning:

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saw pair of grebes doing their mating dance the other week
dind’t manage to get a video so here’s one i found

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Grebes are amazing. The mothers carry their young 'uns round on their backs.

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Is it possible for a crow to mate with a pigeon?

Cos this mate looked like a cross. Very crow-ish looking, but was strutting/waddling along like a pigeon. And crows tend to jump/hop about, right? Dunno. Maybe not. Either way, it looked unusual. Maybe just a crow with a grubby tail. I’ve got a video I’ll maybe try and upload.

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Here we go.

no, they aren’t closely related at all. it looks like the one in your video has got some white feathers, is that right? this is probably leucism, which is where the cells can’t manufacture pigment and can affect lots of species. it does look a bit funny how it’s waddling around but maybe it just wasn’t in a hurry so decided to walk instead of hop?

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Absolutely love this fine if year because you see so many little ducks and coots and stuff. There’s a pair of Crested Grebes nesting on the river near my work who have had two lots of eggs washed away by high water this year. Gutted.

But also these little guys!

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I was walking through Hyde Park the other day, around The Serpentine and towards the Western End, through the more natural bits, I saw a parakeet land on a fence no more than three metres away from me. Sadly it flew off whilst I was fumbling with my phone to take a pic. Couldn’t believe it, have never seen one of those before.

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They’re getting increasingly common across London, apparently - they annoy yer average garden birds, but they still look pretty amazing.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/wildlife/10776252/Noisy-parakeets-drive-away-native-birds.html

There’s a guy on Springwatch listening out for a nightingale at Reading West services, and I want to watch a TV show exclusively about him.

But sadly there’s been a 91% decrease in the population of nightingales in the UK in the past 50 years…

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Now on to bollocks size of starlings

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I have stayed in the Travelodge there more times than is good for anyone’s sanity. So bleak, yet at times as cheap as £16 per night.

I can safely say I never heard any nightingales

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Spotted this guy near my house. I think this a cormorant, can any twitcher let me know please?

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It is. Nice photo

Need to get your parabolic microphone sorted, pronto.

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saw this guy on my bike back from work today


also a jay and some oystercatchers on the same 15 minute route

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It’s saying “I just ate a fish. It was THIS big”

I saw five grey herons on the shore in North Greenwich at lunchtime. I think that’s the most herons I’ve ever seen together. That’s all I got.

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Sure it wasn’t Heron Quays?

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