Another birding walk...

We went on our now "habitual" Sunday morning pilgrimage to Killingworth Lake today, to see how the baby coots are getting on. However you'll need to look at the collage in the extra if you want to see them, as we had the chance to watch some sparrows by the lakeshore hovering while catching insects for their elevenses, and I managed to capture one in the act. They were very quick so it hasn't come out as well as I'd hoped (I could have done with a faster shutter speed) but I still decided to make it the main blip.

As for the coots, they were interesting. The chicks have now lost all their orange feathers and are just beginning to form the white patch above their beaks: I've read that this white patch explains the origin of the term, "bald as a coot", even though it's actually made up of white feathers.

At first we could only see one parent and 4 chicks around the nest that I've photographed previously, so we were concerned about the other 2 chicks. However we then came across 2 other chicks resting on a separate nest not far away, with another adult there. Apparently sometimes parents will look after the chicks in two separate groups as they grow but I don't know whether they actually make another nest for this purpose (do any other blippers know?). We certainly hope that these are all the family we've seen before; we'd not previously spotted the second nest so it might be new - on the other hand it was rather hidden in the long grass on the shore so we might have missed it previously). I'd actually walked past on Wednesday and noticed 5 chicks on the original nest (plus one in the water) and it looked rather crowded!! (I almost sang, "There were 6 on the nest and the little one said, 'Roll over'...!).

In the top left shot in the extra you can see one chick and a parent: the splash next to them resulted when another chick took a dive! The bottom left shows a chick just surfacing from a dive, with a beakful of weed and a bit of weed on its neck. I've added a turtle resting on one of the floating islands on the lake (top right), and bottom right is a photo of a swan actually under water looking for a tasty snack: the water was so still and remarkably clear this morning - I've never seen it so clear before.

All in all an interesting visit.