Coot ballet

I'm finally ready to acknowledge Christmas, and today went into town to tackle the first stint of Christmas shopping. It wasn't as bad as expected - all the shop assistants were polite and cheerful, and I escaped before the crowds had really built up. Also, I purchased an early joint Christmas and birthday present for myself - now I'll have to see whether I can be patient enough to wait for Christmas or whether I'm tempted to try it out early!

To get over the shopping experience, Pete and I took the dogs out to Ferry Meadows country park after lunch. There are three lakes in the park: the smallest was completely frozen over and even the largest one, which is usually ice free in the central, more exposed part, only had two small patches of open water. Consequently most of the park's wildfowl were squeezed together into a positive melee of feral Greylag geese, coots, tufted duck, pochard, mallard, gadwall and great-crested grebes.

Most of the birds seemed happy to bob around in the water, or loaf on the ice, but the coots couldn't seem to decide where to be. A heap of them waltzed across the ice in a line, skipping and flapping quite comically, to get from one pool to the other. And as soon as they arrived half of them decided to go back again! This is the group as they were approaching the second pool - I thought the variety of postures looked as though they had been caught in the middle of a complicated dance sequence. The ducks in the foreground seem totally bored by the whole shenanigans!

Probably best viewed large!