Eyes on the Wild

(This is the first of a series of Zambian posts, all from a glorious rainy season safari to Robin Pope Safaris’ camps Nkwali and Nsefu in the South Luangwa Valley. My guides were Fred, Bertram and Kiki, all hugely knowledgable)

More accurately, the headline should say “On the banks of the cool Luangwa..”, which is hippo heaven right now, when the river is swollen with the rains.  At night they climb onto the banks and graze in the lush grass, and at dawn they return to the river and wallow all day. This one, probably pregnant, was too greedy, and was still out and about in daylight.

Most of the hippos slide happily down quite steep mudbanks:

But this one had qualms:

She walked along, desperate for a way back to the safety of the water, especially with my boat hovering threateningly offshore:

But it was too big an ask.  Finally, she found a gully where another hippo had preceded her, and wedged herself in:

For a moment we thought she was stuck, but she squeezed through, and headed for safety:

 

with a final tidal wave:

PS: For those of you who had deprived childhoods and don’t recognize the Flanders and Swann quote in the title, listen to this and all will become clear:

(After this post I will probably go quiet till March, because I am heading to Zambia today. But when I come back, brace yourselves!)

I am testing my new camera before heading off, so each morning I wander round the Serpentine in Hyde Park.  It is Valentine’s Day as I write this, and clearly Hallmark picked mid-February after watching London’s waterfowl. The males are engaging in two activities that begin with “f”, the first of which is fighting.

Here is a coot, psyching himself up for his joust. Pay attention to the feet, they are his weapons.

Coots have an amazing technique. They launch themselves out of the water by using one foot as a sort of single waterski:

and the other foot is then used to karate-kick the adversary in the chest:

and with luck submerge the poor sod.

The swans just push each other around and chase their competitors away:

Then the victor (possibly Zeus in swan’s form?) reaps the spoils (and this is the other word that begins with “f”).

To calm you down, here is how the greylag geese spend Valentine’s Day: some mutual grooming,  a little cuddle…

One thing leads to another,

and the result is a happy gander:

The upshot of all this is apparent when, outside the café, I almost trip over an Egyptian Goose family (such a cosmopolitan city we live in), recently enlarged by seven new chicks (three of which are still hiding underneath her skirts.)

After all this excitement, you probably need a rest, so luckily for you there will be two weeks of silence from me..

 

 

You may remember that I went to Shoreditch to draw snakes a couple of months ago?? I had so much fun I went again, this time to a room above a pub not that far from the home of Arsenal football team, to draw a baby micropig called Lulu. Here she is:

She is much harder to draw than the snakes, because she never stops moving, hence the blurry photos:

She was very curious, and pretty calm once she got used to being at the centre of a circle of besotted would-be artists.

She was about 8 weeks old, and weighed about 3Kg. She may grow up to be as big as 50lbs, or 23 Kg, so although I rather covet her as my emotional support animal, she will be a little large for those long-distance flights. And think carefully before considering one as a pet…

This was my best attempt:

I will let her say goodbye in person (and notice that like wild pigs her tail is straight rather than curly):

Piglet: “How do you spell ‘love’?”
Pooh:  “You don’t spell it…you feel it.”

A.A. Milne

The Kites and the Swans, from Aesop’s Fables (6th century BC)

The kites of old time had, equally with the swans, the privilege of song. But having heard the neigh of the horse, they were so enchanted with the sound that they tried to imitate it; and, in trying to neigh, they forgot how to sing.

Moral: The desire for imaginary benefits often involves the loss of present blessings.

Here in England the BBC have been broadcasting Winterwatch from Sherborne, my village.  They have shown us stoats in ermine, badgers collecting nest materials, and hawfinches in the yews by the church. I have failed to photograph (or even see) any of these, but the local National Trust Chief Ranger, Mike Robinson, told me where to find the winter roost of the red kites.

So down I went at dusk to a small copse next to the water meadow, and sure enough there were dozens of them circling overhead coming in to roost. Here is a somewhat unexciting photo of something that made my heart soar too:

Back by the weir, the swans do not seem to feel the cold:

But I suspect their huge black rubber feet need to warm up from time to time, so out they come onto the banks, ready to defend their patch against all comers, or at least against me:

Then back to the water:

This photo reminded me of the line from John Clare (1793-1864) that I have used as my title:

The Sherbrooke used to be home to many over-wintering waterfowl, but in recent years there has been less open water because of silting and aquatic plants. Some clearing this year has given us back more open water this winter:

so I thought I would show you a couple of photos. One is a year-round resident, the coot, and at this time of year the males start jousting for territory:

The other is a winter resident, the wigeon. There are only about 400 nesting pairs in the UK, where they nest up in the North of England and Scotland. But in the winter there are about 440,000 birds, most of whom return to breed in Iceland, Scandinavia and Russia. This photo shows a male and a female.

They come in flocks, and feed both in the water and on grass:

Because there are large numbers of winter birds at only a few sites, their UK conservation status is Amber, so it is terrific to have them in Sherborne.

In past years we have also had tufted ducks, but this year I have only seen the odd pair.

There is a reason children play with rubber ducks and not rubber geese: ducks just ooze charm.

Trees do not waste their energy growing branches and twigs whose leaves will not reach the sunlight. In this little grove of trees, the two on the left and right edges have put all their efforts into growing branches on the exterior of the clump, and almost none in the middle. The trees in the middle have simply grown straight up, adding twigs and leaves at the top.  As a result, the entire copse has the same shape as a single tree growing all alone in the middle of a field, and each individual tree gets a decent share of the solar power.

It somehow reminds me of Indian dancers with many arms:

[Photo credit: By Will Folsom [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons]

In writing this, it occurred to me that English has many names for a small group of trees: coppice, copse, spinney, stand, grove. I chose “grove”, “clump”, and “copse”, just for variety.  Unsurprisingly, we also have lots of names for rain: shower, drizzle, downpour, deluge, .. and indeed for coffee.

 

The Sherborne Estate includes farmland and parkland landscaped in the eighteenth  century, in the era of Capability Brown. The designer was Charles Bridgeman. No aristocratic landscape would be complete without the right sort of decorative wildlife.

A rainy weekend, but the weather eased enough for a misty walk, and there above us on the hill posed a herd of fallow deer, with a fine buck at their centre. The photo makes it look as though he still has velvet on his antlers, but that is a trick of the light. At this time of year the velvet has long gone. Fallow deer are the only deer in the UK with palmate antlers (like moose), and at 3-4 years the antlers can be 70cm long.

Some fallow deer are pale fawn and spotted  (at least in summer); but these are plain and darker. The male can measure up to 94cm at the shoulder, and weigh up to 94Kg. They were originally brought to England from the Western Mediterranean by the Romans.

In the seventeenth century the Duttons (owners of Sherborne) built a deer-coursing lodge, Lodge Park (owned by the National Trust). Deer were chased by dogs, and killed in front of the lodge as a spectacle for honored guests. Luckily those days are gone, but Lodge Park is worth a visit..

Down by the brook there are currently five resident swans, three above the weir and two below it. The pair below the weir are older, and the cob (the male) defends his territory fiercely against the upstart youngsters further upstream. Here they are in the shallows, preparing for their pas de deux:

 

 

Here in the Cotswolds the local stone is golden when the sun strikes, but in winter both the buildings and the landscape can look grey. But then the evening sun gilds the water, and the grey heron patrols the edge of the brook, and grey seems not such a bad color after all.

The grey stone walls offer rewards if you have an eye for detail: the snail is a white-lipped banded snail, (Cepaea hortensis), and the indomitable lichen (Caloplaca flavescens?) already has fruiting bodies preparing to disperse spores.

In compensation for the greyness, spring comes early in England, with a flash of gold. These winter aconites (Eranthis hyemalis) are out on January 19th, ahead even of the snowdrops. They are native to Europe, but naturalized throughout the UK.

PS. For copyright reasons, I decided against entitling this post Fifty Shades of …

The temperature is 2C as I write, and brightening up my very urban and fairly monochrome London backyard…

… there be parrots.

 

Londoners may not be surprised, but the rest of you probably associate London with pigeons, not parrots. This pigeon-toed pigeon is looking down on these foreign arrivistes in quivering disbelief, if not affront:

The bright green invading hordes are Ring-necked Parakeets (Psittacula krameri manillensis), and there are many theories as to how they arrived in England from India, but they are now very well established in London and the South East. They have been breeding in England since 1969, and the latest count had 8600 breeding pairs. Read this if you would like more background:

https://londonist.com/london/great-outdoors/london-s-parakeets-everything-you-need-to-know

They travel in noisy flocks, sometimes hundreds strong:

and perch or preen on anything tall, including TV antennae.

At this time of year they are pairing off:

 

I photographed all these from our fourth-floor balcony, as they preened to fluff up their plumage for our Northern climes.

 

PS: They are also called Rosy-necked Parakeets, here’s why:

And I am thrilled they have come to live in my city.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

New Years Eve in the Cotswolds, and the sun set on 2017:

But 30 minutes later the moon rose:

And the first day of 2018 offered a rainbow:

and perhaps something wonderful at its end:

(I left my good camera behind, but technology is very forgiving.)