Dusk

This was my last photo of the day, taken just after dinner in a prematurely dusky garden, with a rainstorm on the way. As you can probably see from the droplets on the open bloom, it wasn't the first rain of the day, and I think we might reach the point quite soon when we can stop saying, "Never mind - the garden needs it." 

The rose is Crown Princess Margareta, my favourite of the David Austin shrubs, which as well as looking like peaches and apricots manages to smell of them as well. I have it tied in to an obelisk as a short climber, though it's so vigorous it scoffs at the notion of being trained, and will shoot to ten feet or more if I let it run away from me. This is its second flush of flowers this year, which it's producing despite the fact that I haven't yet deadheaded it, to remind me who's in charge. I swear it sniggers when it sees me approaching with the secateurs, but when you're as beautiful as this you can get away with bad behaviour. (So I hear.)

My second photo goes back to the other end of the day, when I arrived at Farmoor Reservoir for a bird-and-dragon walk, stepped onto the pathway, and immediately began counting species: "1. Mallard; 2. Coot; 3: WHAT'S THAT?" I even resorted to asking some other human beings, but they didn't know either, so I snapped a phone photo and asked Obsidentify, which told me it was a Red-crested Pochard. Now, I've met Red-crested Pochards before, both in the captive collection at Slimbridge and living wild in the Cotswold Water Park (the latter said to be the epicentre of a well-established breeding colony of feral escapees from ornamental waterfowl collections), and I don't expect them to look like this. So - an eclipse male, maybe? Or a female, or a juvenile? A little research tells me that the plumage would work for any of those, but even in eclipse an adult male would have a red bill, a juvenile male would have a pink one, and an adult female's grey bill would have a red tip. So I think this individual, with an entirely grey bill, is most probably a juvenile female. Despite being a little, shall we say, understated, she's by far the most interesting bird I saw all afternoon, and she takes my 2025 bird list to 132 species. Which isn't too bad, I think, for someone whose level of dedication to birding barely qualifies as minimal.

I won't regale you here with the details of my only dragon encounter of the day - which involves a Brown Hawker, a pond, a bridge, and an increasingly frustrated photographer - because to do the story justice it needs be told via the medium of interpretative dance. If you see me out on the street, waving my arms at someone, jumping backwards and forwards, and spinning like a gyroscope, assume I'm telling them all about it.