Cootling: on land

I was foiled by the weather today...
I visited the pond on Wandsworth Common in the early afternoon armed with very large umbrella: it wasn't raining that hard, but was drizzling quite persistently. I took my lens cap off when I reached the common, but, on reaching the pond, realised that the front of my lens was soaked... Strange: I held the camera against my chest as I walked and I didn't get dripped on... I dried it off, and started to amble around only for it to quickly become spritzed and misty again... It seems that despite the relatively gentle drizzle, there was an awful lot of tiny water droplets drifting about in the air, so despite my umbrella, my lens kept getting covered with water.
Grrr, my patience didn't last long. I got a nice picture of a swan under the bridge over the pond, but am not blipping it because it is rather too much like the picture of the heron...

SO, later in the afternoon I visited the goslings on Eagle Pond on Clapham Common. It was raining much harder (...) so I felt confident that I knew how the rain would fall, and so would be protected by gravity and my umbrella. Success - the rain fell downwards and my camera stayed dry and clear!

The goslings seemed well: Angel Wing is out on a limb all by himself which is sad. He seems pretty chipper (perhaps... He's behaving normally) and is fending for himself quite happily, but it is sad that he regularly tries to rejoin the family only to be aggressively chased away by the father.
The goslings really look like little geese now: they're almost completely fledged (although their plumage doesn't look like a mature adult's; most conspicuously they lack patches around their eyes...). BUT, they still sound like little goslings which is amazingly cute: they still only "peep" and "chirrup".

But, I got sidetracked photographically because the two (not very little) cootlings were being coaxed out of the pond by their parents. These ones have not come so close before (they stay on the water, or on the central island); the two chicks are quite different in size, and the larger one has an unusually long neck which looks very funny! This is the little one, and it just looked too cute looking uncomfortable and suspicious on the grass near the goslings. The larger one ventured further from the parents, but this one was never more than a couple of meters from a parent. I was crouching quite close to it and it kept twitching as though it'd run off; it managed to keep its cool, but kept an eye fixed on me at all times.
Look at its feet! Not quite as oversized as those of the moorhenling, but the webbing means they can still compete in the strange foot competition...