Bird on a stick

This morning R and I cleaned every remaining reception room bar the snug, and decked them out in Christmas glitz. After lunch we went off to Evesham to run separate errands, meeting up afterwards in the Waitrose café, which is currently serving the most reliable coffee in town. Then we walked through Abbey Park, along part of the riverbank, over the Workman Bridge and back up to Bengeworth where we'd left the car.

R has been telling me for weeks now that a Cormorant has taken up winter residence in Evesham; he's seen it several times off the north side of the bridge, which may mean that it's living on the overgrown spit of land that protrudes into the middle of the river there. Today though the bird, whose pale speckled belly identifies it as a juvenile, was sitting on a heavily pollarded tree on the other side of the bridge, preening itself and drying its wings after hunting. 

I took quite a few shots as we crossed the bridge, most of which have a large conifer in the background that adds context to the photos, but I've surprised myself by preferring the images that present the bird quite starkly against the flat, pale grey sky. Tonight's extra, which is the pose I always think of as "Wanna buy a watch?" would have made it to top spot if the angle of the cut stump hadn't hidden the Cormorant's feet and legs. This shot, taken just a few seconds later from a slightly different angle, surely qualifies for the dreaded "bird on a stick" epithet, but the clean simplicity of it works for me.

I've posted the only other interesting bird I spotted today to my Facebook page, if you'd care to take a look. I regularly see feral Greylag/domestic goose hybrids, but aside from being white they generally look almost identical to their species ancestor. This one though had dewlaps, and was so massive that it completely dwarfed the Canada Geese around it, and I'd never seen anything like it before. A little research has revealed it to be a Toulouse Goose, a highly bred domesticated variety, and a bird that probably shouldn't be out in the park on its own. I hope it survives long enough for its owner to find and recapture it.