Glenstone park/museum
Fabulous. I am deeply envious - I have only ever seen owls in the wild a couple of times in my life.
j
At least your swamp looks a bit more like a swamp now!
j
I’m not much further south than you and the only time I saw one at Thanksgiving was during a particularly warm fall, when I was living in an inner circle suburb of Minneapolis. Those poor birdies.
@ZamboniAce1000, I live less than a mile from a wildlife refuge.
Must be from after my time. I lived nearby close to the intersection of Travilah and Darnestown (when it was still part of Route 28.)
We’ve had a long spell of (by UK standards) extremely cold weather, with snow on the ground for nearly a week. The weather then broke, and it poured down for a couple of days. And then today was a glorious midwinter day, warm (11C) and sunny. This isn’t exactly nature*, but these guys were absolutely loving it:
The whole herd - more than a hundred I would guess - were gently strolling left to right, with lots of bleating at one another - something I don’t remember hearing before.
I wasn’t the only person to stop and look.
j
* - it’s a deer park
You live in a wondrous place, @Treppenwitz!
Hah! Last week, during the cold snap, we walked through the deer park at Warnham (birthplace of Percy Bysshe Shelley) (born in Warnham, not the deer park - you know what I mean.)
That one has public footpaths running through it - not recommended in October - and we saw exactly ONE deer, about a half mile away. So I guess I was owed today’s encounter.
j
We’re planning to visit London in April and spend a day at Windsor. The deer park there is on our list to visit. I hope we get lucky enough to see a herd - I’ll give them our herd’s greetings 
Cattle Egret Update!
They’re back. (This is about my personal Cattle Egret colony, located 20 or so miles south of London – see posts ~ 1132 et seq for how I found it).
I hadn’t seen any birds since maybe April; their RSPB* page describes them as a winter migrant, but these days who knows whether a species will migrate or not? Our local Canada geese don’t seem to bother any more. Certainly there are many cattle egrets just across the channel in Northern France during the summer.
And then there was the drought and unprecedented heat of the summer in the UK (highest temperatures ever recorded), which wiped out a lot of wildlife. So I was…concerned. The muddy, cattle-filled fields where the egrets lived became dried out to dust, so basically that habitat disappeared for several months.
The year rolled on. We’ve had a prodigiously wet November - the egrets’ fields became a muddy, cattle churned mess once again. Today we took a trip out there and - they’re back! We saw maybe ten birds across several fields, doing their thing. So, all good news.
j
* - RSPB: Royal Society for the Protection of Birds; much like the Audubon Society
Odd sight! I just happened to look out the window and what to my wandering eyes should appear, but a flock of swans beating into the wind flying over the frozen lake.
Not a smoothly gliding motion, wings working hard, still they were going along quickly. Where too, a sheltered field I guess.
The otter just went across the back yard. It came from the neighbour’s yard, on the house side of the woodshed. I said, ‘Hey, otter!’ It kind of rolled and looked at me with a quizzical expression. I said, ‘Hey, otter!’ again, and it made a diagonal in the direction of the house, disappearing under the deck.
Not what I saw, but what I heard: Coyotes howling to each other last night. Not as ‘raise the dead’ awful as a cat fight, but it got my attention.
When I went out to feed the birds this morning, there was a perfect outline of what I presume to be the tips of owl wings in the new snow. The owl must have caught some poor unsuspecting critter and ate it with its wings kind of covering it. I could also see the big “hop” marks where he hopped through the snow.
I’ve seen pictures of this in several subreddits (animal tracking and whatsthisbird).
Very cool find!
This little guy was on the lake in our local park yesterday and today.
Not a very sharp photo - sorry, but the light was poor and she wouldn’t swim close to shore. I say “she” because I think it’s a leucistic albino female mallard. When I took the photo I remember thinking “hmm - swimming with mallards” but I only did my provisional ID much later, so I can’t be sure. I ended up googling leucistic albino female mallard and found a few decent matches (but I’m not posting a link here because they were all Shutterstock and the like, with detailed information about licensing fees…)
I’m pretty sure I haven’t seen a duck like this before. Local spotter @merrick , birdmeister @Tamerlane - any thoughts?
j
Mallards are the most common duck in my area. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an albino one in person. Nice catch.
Quiet time of year for this thread. But here’s a bit of housekeeping. Two years ago, at the height of lockdown…
It was only much later that I thought, You know what, I bet they were actually cattle egrets…
Well, they’re back. I saw a pair of them today, rushed home, got some field glasses, shot back out there - cattle egrets, no question in my mind. So that’s two local colonies (can you call a pair a colony?). I’m on a mission now.
As an aside, I have always assumed that biathlon is a particular challenge because it consists of two disciplines, one of which requires you to massively accelerate your heart rate (cross-country skiing); and the other of which requires as low a heart rate as you can manage (shooting). Can I just point out, from recent experience, that riding a bike and birding with field glasses also has a whiff of this sort of challenge about it?
j
Last Saturday was rather cold and windy, but my walk through the park was rewarded with a close up sighting of this heron:
A fellow walker told me that he is a permanent resident of the lake.
@Treppenwitz - regarding your duck, your guess is at least as good as mine. The only thing that makes me hesitate to agree with you is that not many of my images searches for albino and/or leucistic mallards come up with that combination of dark bill and very pale plumage with no visible patterning, though this one come close.
I’m wondering if it might be a hybrid, probably with a domestic white duck.
Thread tax - yesterday I saw my first red kite of the year, circling over farmland between Broxbourne and Bencroft woods. They’ve definitely got more common in the last few years.