As I was walking round this May Day morning (between 2 breakfasts) …
I saw a Robin eating an insect…
squirrels eating something secretively…
a blackbird eating a worm..
and a duck eating a crumb.
An alternative entry for the MAY 2017 THEME DAY GALLERY – LET’S EAT!
Love your take on Theme Day, beautiful images!
Great photos, especially the Robin!
I wasn’t quick enough for a photo Backstreeter but not for the first time I’ve just seen a red kite swoop down and take a duckiling of the Thames! Think they are a pest now !
Isn’t that what nature “red in tooth and claw” is about? The food chain is cruel but it is the way creatures survive.
Conservation programmes seem (to me) to be very complicated. Save the Red Kite becomes Red Kite is a pest. Save the elephant until one goes on the rampage. Save the tiger till it kills something else we want to save.
Introducing a predator to eradicate a pest is problematic. Cane toads in Australia are a classic example.
I did see two robins fighting and that was tooth and claw. Too quick for the camera – just a blur!
How wonderful you live where you can see so much wildlife engaged in having breakfast in such a short time span. Even when I’m at my rural home, I’m never up early enough to see those early birds catching worms.
I came home today to a dead blackbird on the lawn, not sure how it died but another blackbird was enjoying a meal of its brain and internal organs. It is just nature surviving how it can. I am sure the duck population can cope.
important to remember, kites belong – they were reintroduced to us rather than being introduced.
leave them be and they will thrive alone, no need for us to feed them.
I agree, Rudi; I should have been clearer, I did not mean that the red kite was introduced – simply, that we fiddle around with the balance of things at their peril and ours.
Feeding wildlife is problem. When I was a child feeding the ducks was something we did. We probably didn’t realise that we were feeding the rats at the same time.
All that said, great pictures!
ppjs, your comment about rats is quite true. If one sits still in the Margaret Brown Gardens, after the children have finished feeding the ducks, you can see and hear the rats scurrying around picking up pieces of dropped bread.
I read somewhere that robins and humans are the only two species to fight to the death over territory.
Peter:
You really don’t want to know this – but….
When I was in Reading my church was opposite the building site that became the Forbury Square development. I became chaplain on the site and got to know the construction team very well. They told me that when they began to dig the foundations an estimated 40,000 rats were disturbed.
An elderly lady felt it her mission in life to feed the birds (pigeons); the rats were very grateful.