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| The Serpentine - looking towards Horse Guards and The London Eye |
It is a beautiful summer's evening in London and I take a few minutes to stroll around the Serpentine - the long streak of water in the middle of St James' Park and between Horse Guards Parade and the famous roundabout outside Buckingham Palace.
This is a great place for birds. Some exotic ducks and geese are kept here. Their flight feathers are cut so they cannot fly away, but many others choose to live here.
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| Goose Corner - some Canada and greylag geese |
Hundreds of people are strolling through the royal park and around the lake this evening. The Victorian model of parks for the people in the middle of cities - as places where the working people could take exercise and 'find oxygen' - is still serving us well. But actually the great bird-infested water-.feature are older than even this.
The long lake was dug for King Charles II; for his recreation. He swam there in the summer and skated on the ice in the winter, and he had a collection of water birds which included pelicans sent by the Russian Czar.
Some 350 years later there are still signs that warn about pelicans but where are they?.
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| A line of coots |
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| Egyptian geese amid the daisies |
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| A herring gull with bracelet |
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| A prominent non-avian local - the American grey squirrel |
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| A moorhen feeds her wierd little 'bald' and blue headed chicks - note their pink 'fingers'. |
And finally here are the pelicans - wisely sleeping out on an island in the middle of the lake.
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| The Pelicans of London Town |
The long lake was dug for King Charles II; for his recreation. He swam there in the summer and skated on the ice in the winter, and he had a collection of water birds which included pelicans sent by the Russian Czar.
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