Disallowed

Well, this wasn't on my New Year bird list bingo card.

I hadn't expected to be going out at all today, after waking to the tail end of yesterday's storm, but by lunchtime the gale had blown through and the rain had stopped, and after finding ourselves short of paper for wrapping the Grandsons' birthday presents R and I made a snap decision to head into Stratford. We'd half expected not to be able to walk up the south bank of the river, but it was passable, if boggy, so we were able to get a decent walk as well.

The first unusual bird I saw when I reached the Bancroft wharf was the Cormorant in my second photo, which was fishing busily and productively, moving at speed and using the full width of the river. This made it quite difficult to photograph in the afternoon's atrocious light, and I'd pretty much given up on it and was turning to leave when I noticed this Black Swan, which was begging food from tourists in the shadow of the floating ticket kiosk. Trying to get a focused shot of a black bird in a dark corner redefined for me the word "difficult", and I began to think about going back to the Cormorant, but luckily the waterfowl flock moved away from the kiosk when someone began throwing food to them from further along the wharf, and I finally captured the swan out on the open water. 

The Black Swan was introduced to the UK from Australia in the C19th as an ornamental bird, and thanks to repeated escapes from waterfowl collections it has become naturalised in several areas of the country (notably East Anglia, where there's said to be an established breeding population). Sadly for my birding stats though, it's still not listed as a British bird: the BirdTrack app allowed me to enter it in today's list, but when my year count updated a few minutes later, the Black Swan was gone. However, despite it being officially disallowed, I consider this to be an excellent start to the new birding year.

By the way, this is a typical swimming posture for this species, which is able to filter-feed at the surface, as well as dipping its head or upending completely to search for food in deeper water. The Black Swan is exclusively vegetarian, feeding on algae and a variety of aquatic plants. On today's evidence I'd say that it's also quite partial to waterfowl pellets.