Christine's walking & birds blog

Mute swans aren't a favourite but this one looked nice against the dark water.

Just a bit further along was the water rail; I hoped to get both birds in the same shot but I wasn't lucky. The rail left the water, clambered up to where the warbler had been and then also disappeared. (The rail photo doesn't bear cropping any more, so it looks as though the bird is smaller than the warbler!)

I s'pose leaving your bottles in a nice neat group kind of makes up for thinking that it's someone else's job to clear up after you.
Apart from the rubbish, the chief feature today was the number of couples around the place canoodling. You can't help picking them up in your bins as you scan the islands from the opposite bank, and then you're the one who feels guilty and slinks away!