Startling starling

Much better in large ("L")!

I've adjusted exposure and sharpness, but haven't touched the colours: those are simply the product of the light on its feathers with iridescent structural colouring (colour achieved not by pigments, but by the way light scatters off the specific nano-structure of the feather barbs). Structural colouring is responsible for all of the oily, iridescent colours that birds display: the specula on their wings, the dazzling array of colours on peacocks, and all other patches on birds' plumage which change colour when the angle of incidence changes. Arthropods and fish also use structural colouring, but the structures that cause the interference effects differ between groups (e.g. fishes achieve a huge range of colours due to variation in the spacing of guanine crystal plates within their scales).

ANYWAY, today I went for a wonderful wlunchtime walk with colleages; we wandered through Kensington Gardens and enjoyed the sunny (but cold) autumn day. The squirrels in Kensington Gardens are ridiculously tame, and will approach hoping for food; I tried to get down low to photograph them, but they would quickly approach too close for my zoom lens to focus! One actually jumped onto the leg of one of my colleagues without any coaxing, which I found very surprising.
We wandered around the large pond in the gardens where they are many swans, greylag geese, black-headed gulls, and swarms of stunning starlings. There were also a few coots marauding menacingly... I very much enjoyed photographing the starlings in the bright, crisp light which seemed to make their iridescence even more spectacular than when I photographed them in the summer.
I've put a different sort of shot on blipfolio here, because I found deciding so tricky (and there were many other contenders besides...).

p.s. There were also a family of Egyptian geese by the pond; they had goslings! They are apparently 6ish weeks old (although the first one I saw was tiny, and much less mature than the others, which made me think they were 3ish weeks old initially). I had to resist the urge to abandon work, and also had to keep up with the others on our walk, so I only took a handful of photos of them.
p.p.s. Another in my "Familiarity Breeds Contempt" series...?