Stealthy

After spending much of the morning planning meals and ordering Christmas food and drink I felt that I needed some bird therapy, so I headed for the nearest reliable birding site, which is Hillers at Dunnington. Usually reliable, that is. Today I hadn't even reached the entrance to the garden when one of the gardeners, pulling an apologetic face, told me that there was forestry work going on and the bird hide was closed. So as to salvage something from the trip I went into the farm shop and bought a couple of boxes of mince pies for the psychopaths those in the family who eat the horrid things, and then headed off to Stratford.

I caught sight of this Grey Heron at Lucy's Mill just as I came off the bridge, and spent about half an hour watching and photographing it, as it moved around in the scrub at the bottom of the apartments' garden. Grey Herons always walk slowly and stealthily when they're hunting, but this bird was moving very carefully indeed, especially once it stepped down into the water. The Avon is high and flowing fast at the moment because of all the rain we've had over the past few weeks, and even these supposed shallows are currently pretty deep, so its caution was justified - Grey Herons can swim, but you don't often see them doing it, and presumably it didn't want to lose its footing.

During the time I was watching I didn't see Heron catch anything, or even strike, and I was rather surprised that it stayed in a spot that offered such poor hunting. Another effect of the recent rains and floods has been to wash a lot of mud into the river and churn up the river bed, so the water is like brown soup at the moment, and there seemed little chance of it spotting potential prey. There's a weir about a hundred metres further along the river, with stone edges from which I've seen herons fishing on other occasions, and I'd have thought this would have offered better hunting. But this is a mature bird, so it's fair to assume that it knows its own business.