birds & foxes
The Fox.
The streets of London are ever changing. However much you think you know your area, you don’t unless you occupy it eyes-wide-open for all hours of the day during every season of the year. The only ones to do this are the shift workers who make London tick, the road cleaners, nurses, hospital porters, market traders and transport workers who see the small hours alongside London’s other nocturnal residents. Shift workers recognise foxes, prostitutes and fellow workers waiting for the same buses, tubes and trains. The wealthy think they own the city, and they certainly take its spoils, but few of them would survive in the glorious viscera that forms the real substance of the city.
I’ve seen huge rats hauling booty off to their underground world halt briefly to check whether I’m a threat, sharing a glance with me before resuming their work. Humans and creatures are interchangeable as they go about their mostly silent business in the dark. The beautiful burnished brown fox with its burned matchstick legs is such a handsome creature. But it’s much maligned and often classed as vermin because it scavenges on the crap we dump in their territory. Which is literally rubbish, and we ought to praise foxes because they eat rats. Cats don’t. Lazy-arsed felines who can hardly bothered to leave the sofa won’t kill an adult rat, nor even dissuade it. The cat and the rat will simply nod at each other and carry on with their own business. I saw all of this and more at the start of an early shift or the end of a late one. Like crews changing shifts on the roadside, the creatures do the same.
As the cat goes home, the rat comes out, and the fox make its presence known and so it continues until that cat yawns and gets up off the bed, waking up Sonia from Edgely Road, who realises she’s late for the bus, quickly dresses, dashes out of the house and hurtles down the road to the bus stop, probably forgetting to feed the cat. (from my memoir).
Oh and that noise that sounds like a baby being eaten my a dog, usually at about 5am. That’s the foxes screaming at one another.
The Coot
A familiar bird of our wetlands, the Coot is often seen on park lakes, ponds, rivers and canals. It spends more of its time on the water than its relative, the Moorhen, and will dive to catch small invertebrates. Unlike ducks, Coots will bring their catch to the surface before eating it, leading to squabbles over food. Coots breed in spring, laying between six and nine eggs in nests made among emergent vegetation. Coot chicks are black with orange fluff around the face and body; they are independent within two months of hatching.
The Coot can be distinguished from the similar-looking Moorhen by its larger size, entirely black body (with no white patches), and bright white bill. Coots spend much of their time away from the bankside, diving for food.
The are also extremely bloody noisy and argue with anything that passes by. The hate seagulls, those robbers eat their babies. You’ll soon learn the alarm call they make when a herring gull passes over head. I love them.
Swans
The elegant birds that glide across the water with their long necks stylishly arched have been material for myths and legends since storytelling began. As romantic icons, they rival Romeo and Juliet.
Mute swans mate for life, forming strong emotional bonds when they pair up. Both parents play a role in guarding and rearing their offspring. The rumour of royal ownership also enhances the swan's regal bearing. In truth, the Queen only claims ownership of some unmarked swans on certain stretches of the River Thames.
The swan most familiar to us in the UK is the mute swan, so called because they make comparatively little vocal noise while flying. These birds can be found year-round on most of our lakes, slow-moving rivers and canals, both in open country and in busier towns and cities. Mute swans display little fear of humans in Britain where they have long been domesticated, but the wild birds in Asia are more timid and difficult to approach.
Young swans, known as cygnets, leave the nest after just two days and follow their parents to the water. Sometimes an endearing family portrait is formed when the cygnets are carried on Mum or Dad's back, sheltered by their curved white wings.
Moorhens are also called marsh hens or river chickens. They are small black feathered birds (smaller than coots) with a red pointed beak and are found near marshes, ponds and streams. Moorhens can live in cities as well as the countryside. To help them with swimming and walking on slippery surfaces they have webbed toes. A moorhen’s diet consists of insects, water-spiders, plants and larger animals such as lizards.
Moorhens.
Browns
“There are Afternoon Teas, and there are Afternoon Teas fit for a queen. Queen Victoria loved to take hers at Brown’s, in our irresistibly elegant Drawing Room.” - So they say, gets good reviews but I haven’t tried it because I can’t be arsed with afternoon tea.