Bushy Park

We were up and out early today to get to Bushy Park before the Sunday hordes and had a really pleasant few hours wandering around taking photos. Polly came too and walked to begin with, then rode in the pushchair, which got her lots of attention and people kept stopping to make a fuss of her. I would never have thought when we got her ten years ago that she'd ever let people get that close to her; it reminds me how far she's come from that scared little rescue dog she used to be.

I've said it before (in fact, I say it every time I've been to Bushy) that if I could live within walking or cycling distance I would, and I'd be there every day with my camera and never tire of communing with the wildlife there, which is so unfazed by humans. This heron was perching for ages on a low dead tree overlooking the model boating pond (rather than the heron pond) and posing for pictures.

In Extras is another heron catching a fish (in the heron pond), a deer and jackdaw, and one of the many parakeets. The red deer rut doesn't seem to have got going yet, but we'll be back again in the near future and it probably will have by then.