Towheeblog

Having survived my own many hours in flight, I needed to see some creatures better fitted for life in the air. So our Dulwich friend guided my wife and I through his neighborhood parks.

In a small nameless slough in Belair Park, Dulwich, we found a pair of Mandarin Ducks. The Mandarin has true “glam” as a Brit tabloid might have it. That would be “glamour” in your Oxford English dictionary. Mandarins aren’t native but have gone feral and are breeding in the wild. Here is the slough and the alert male. His likely mate was sleeping in the shadows a few feet away. She has the same white eye spectacle as her cousin, the female Wood Duck common in southern Oregon.

This is a Wood-Pigeon–about the rotundity of an American Band-tailed. It is delicately plucking small berries singly, in a bush in Dulwich Park.

This bird is very similar to its near relative, the Great Blue Heron of the Western Hemisphere.

These are Eurasian Moorhen, quite common and tame around city parks with water. They’re now considered a separate species from our renamed “Common Gallinule” in North America. Appearance? Identical as far as I can tell.

Here are a couple of Eurasian Coots. They are larger than American Coots and have a slightly more bulbous white area at the base of their white beak. The first bird is immature and thus not as glossy or dark as an adult.