July 24th – Lots of waterfowl are on second clutches of the season now; a tiny minority possibly on their third.
At Bentley Bridge on the Walsall Canal this delightful clutch of ducklings, maybe a few days old, proudly watched over by mum.
A beautiful sight.
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June 26th – the weather was grey and overcast on the way home and it had been raining, but I managed to just miss the showers. At Walsall Wood, momma mallard was inexplicably stewarding her new brood through a clump of water lilies.
The ducklings, confused, were endlessly entertaining as they tried to stand on the foliage and invariably failed. Their mother seemed to be enjoying the spectacle and there seemed to be plenty of food in the clump too.
A lovely entertaining thing to see – and those waterlines are gorgeous.
May 2nd – The canals locally are a joy at the moment. Spring is in full effect and in one short journey between Walsall and Darlaston I saw new goslings, moorhen and coot chicks and an older family of ducklings.
When your ride to work contains such wonderful things, it’s hard not to have a great day.
May 27th – The birdlife on the canals of Birmingham and the Black Country is wonderful at the moment – everywhere there are goslings, cygnets and ducklings, and the herons were performing well, too – I particularly liked this guy’s Eddie Cochran impression.
Iff these don’t make you go ‘ahhh’, you’ve no soul…
May 5th – This is always a nice first to chalk up for the year – the first duck and coot chicks have hatched. On the Walsall Canal at Pleck, proud mum and dad with large clutch of nine ducklings, and these three coots were spotted in Goscote, the rest of the family in overhanging bushes. I still think coot chicks have cute in shedloads.
Still no swan or Canada geese hatchlings yet.
August 13th – It may be late summer, but there’s still young ones about on the new pool at Clayhanger – fine, healthy mallard ducklings pottered about, as did a couple of moorhen chicks out with mum.
Ducklings have all the cute – but young moorhens seem to have the same dishevelled, grumpy appearance as young owls. They look like befuddled old men.
They are very endearing though.
June 10th – For the second time in two days, I hit Chasewater. I was going on to ride the Sherbrook Valley on the Chase, but couldn’t resist a spin around the park in the sunshine. The weather was warm and soft, and I was in shorts and shirtsleeves. The boating pool was, as usual, a cloudy soup of mallards, canada geese, swans and coots, mingling with bird waste and discarded bread, but the waterfowl seem happy enough. Unusually, a mallard had her ducklings on the lake, including this rather fetching yellow one. A lovely thing indeed.
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