I discovered that there's a great little heronry in Regent's Park earlier this week. In fact, I was so fascinated by the big nests that I almost fell into the lake! Fortunately, I remembered to look down at my feet instead of up at the nests, and managed to avoid a soaking.
There's quite a bit of activity there at the moment, as there seem to be some adolescent herons in the nests. To be honest, I don't really know much about them, but they didn't look big enough to be fully-grown, and I spotted three of them in one nest, so they didn't look like nesting couples either. Although there was one particular heron who seemed to have been a bit lost, as it kept landing on nests only to be shooed out by the resident. Perhaps it was a rather persistent young male trying to usurp the absent males who belonged to those nests, it's the right time of year, after all.
Whilst I was watching the birds, Britain's most famous twitcher stopped alongside. As mentioned on Twitter at the time, I got quite excited, because many years ago it was part of my Friday night routine to watch his show on BBC2 (Thursday nights were my big night out, so I made the most of all my flatmates being out on Fridays to wind down at home after work). He disappeared before I could ask him about the herons, but apparently that's just as well as he's got a reputation for being a grumpy antisocial bugger (you wouldn't think so from his attitude on television).
Anyway, now that I've discovered the nests, I'm going to pop along a few more times this year just to watch the herons because it's fantastic to have such great examples of nature smack bang in the middle of the city, isn't it? Hopefully next time I'll be able to get some better photos, as well.
Plus, if the weather's nice, it'd be fun to take one of the boats out on the lake, like this couple did.
