Baby pictures

I'm not a person who automatically goes "oooooh" with human babies but get all soft with animal offspring.


Canada geese, the chicks look like Kiwis



Coot chicks insist on being beak fed even though Mallards half their size are confidently taking Tesco wild bird feed pellets and even diving (looks quite fun to see their tiny bums sticking up from the water ).

In spite of their perhaps questionable beauty, I call baby Coots "Cutes".



The family. The parents are incredibly aggressive and chase away even Swans. I'll not mention poor Moorhen, too graphic



Geese- the wildlife in this lake is very tame as it's by a shopping centre so everybody shares their fries and pizza with the birds. The goselings rushed to see if we had any.



Mallards. Even the dad is spending some quality time with the brood, usually the males just hang about with the lads.



Our resident Swans. They know they are protected and often take over the road and the footpath. Swans are big and strong animals so we mere humans just respectfully give them their room. Including the boys on their way to Amigo Pizza.

 

Not wanting to put a downer on this, but locally its become a pastime to take pot shots with catapults, lot of dead ones around.
The swans in the park had a nest and I could see the swan sitting on eggs presumably, after a couple of days the nest was abandoned.

 

How awful!

Here people seem to be very respectful towards wildlife and animals in general. Well, seen that Newcastle is a city where the Town Moor has a herd of cows perhaps folks are just used to sharing their lives with animals

Yesterday we visited a nature reserve (you have to pay £5 to get into nature ) and shared the birdwatching hide with an elderly couple with a child of around 8.

The child had a very professional and expensive looking gadget, an amalgamation of binoculars, tablet and a camera apparently. He was leaning steeply out of the observing hatch and I was just making mental bets whether the first one to fall into the lake is the gadget, the boy, or a combination.

My Child told me off from staring at strangers and dragged me out before I found out.

 

Some more...

The pretty ones:



And the Moorhen, the chicks seriously look and behave like gangly teenager vultures



Tadpoles