A great day for ducks

Wareham Quay, Isle of Purbeck.

This morning's gray sky and perma-drizzle suggested a watery photographic theme for today.

When I got to the river Frome in Wareham a lady was feeding the birds - mainly black-headed gulls and a family of swans - on Abbott's Quay. Too late. In fact she had almost finished the feeding, and the swans and gulls were disputing the booty. But they quickly settled down to preening and exhibiting reasonably polite behaviour. The all-invasive drizzle meant that I had to wipe the camera's UV filter every minute or so. I moved across the bridge to Wareham Quay, and discovered an ideal scene of ducks and autumnal dampness.

Another day I may engage my own bird-feeder to operate on the same spot, and with luck the ensuing fray will produce a chaotic image illustrating just how annoying black-headed gulls can be.

On a linguistic note (one here mainly for George) both the German and French languages call black-headed gulls "laughing gulls". And to add to the confusion, there is also in German a "black head gull" - it emerges that this is called a "mediterranean gull" in England.

In Germany I came across a delightful book of sketches under the title "Laughing gulls have no sense of humour". That proposition may well be particularly apt to those gulls residing in and near Wareham. The human youngsters in the town know that the gulls are very keen on chips - there is a chippy just up the road - and will taunt the gulls with them. A particularly mean trick is to hold a chip against a window on the INSIDE of a car, and watch the gulls' vain and perhaps painful efforts to carry it off.

(Chips = fried potatoes ; chippy = fish and chips shop.)