Black swan cygnet

I was at Travis Wetland ( I still want to call it Travis Swamp) this morning, with a group of photographers on a field trip. I don't really expect to achieve much on these trips, as they are more of a learning exercise to find out how other people do things, than to actually get any good images. We were very lucky with the weather, as although the wind was cold, it was fine and sunny, with the sun still relatively low in the sky. We had expected the tail end of a southerly storm, but fortunately it didn't come to much here.

Most of my best efforts were rather boring ducks (and a couple of sheep), but it was nice to see the black swans with their cygnets. It is interesting that young swans have a separate name from young geese (goslings) and ducks (ducklings), that we still use, unlike some of the collective terms that have generally gone out of use (bevy of swans, scattering of herons etc). I presume these very precise terms were used when more people were living in rural areas and hunting the birds and animals for food. My dentist has a poster with a list of collective nouns on the ceiling, so I get a chance to revise them every so often (preferably not so often).

Anyway, we had a good time, and we all learned something, I think.