Cheeky gull

After a lazy morning with the kids catching up with their new Christmas toys we decided to round them up for a jaunt to Inverleith Park to look at the swans. As usual, we totally forgot to bring any bread with us. Which may have been a good thing because there was a sign from the council indicating that our normal bread was of terrible quality and would not have sufficed for the resident swans. Instead, we followed this chap around the lake while he offloaded his bag of council-approved, extremely nutritious, wholegrained, organic, unleavened (I made that bit up) bread.

There's a whole genre of photography dedicated to capturing birds in flight, and I thought it would be fun to give that a go today. Unfortunately, it's really sobering to realise just how terrible I am at that discipline. Especially in getting something interesting in focus. To the extent that the only shots I was reasonably happy with had the subjects standing around and not doing any flying whatsoever. Including this one, first spotted by my wife as she thought it somewhat cheeky. I have no idea what evolutionary advantage standing on a swan's back gives to gulls, but it wasn't for very long and it quickly flew off. So this was actually quite a tough shot to pull off... Honest!