Who's a Pretty Boy Then?

Who's a Pretty Boy Then?

I promise you a moth free post today. I've done three posts on them, and I think its time to have a break from them... is it too late to start lent? One thing is for sure, I'm certainly not going out in the garden after finishing this post, and I am most definitly not going to put out the moth trap. Oh no.

Where better to get out to than Bushy Park, where the woodland should be alive with early spring birdsong, and there was even the possibility of getting an early Wheatear out on the grassland. Win-win situation.

We started out at the Water Gardens, or was it the Canal Plantations? I always get mixed up with the two places. They could even be different names for the same place? I just don't know. Perhaps I should look a map. For the sake of the blog though, let's just say I went to the Canal Plantations.

The blossom appearing on some of the trees was an absolute explosion that was quite hard to miss...

Even harder to ignore were the birds that were perched in the trees, Ring-necked Parakeets. We all moan at them when we're at home, complaining at how they scare other birds away, and take their nest sites. Then we go out and come face to face with one, and are completely possessed by them. They are the ultimate non-conformists. We don't get colours like that in England (unless perhaps on a Camden Town street corner after a friday night).

Bloody foreign birds stealing our native birds jobs an- ohhh its soooo pretttyyyy...

I took a few more shots, and looking back through them noticed that the birds were taking small branches of flowers, eating a small part of one or two flowers, and then dropping the rest on the ground. Now, I'm no mathematician, but by using complex calculations on causation and effect relationships, I have concluded that the Parakeets, by dropping flowers, may actually have caused the carpet of pink to form beneath the trees.

That is possibly one of the stupidest things I've ever said on this blog, but when you think about it, thats a heck of a lot of flowers to drop for a bird.
Pick up...

And drop...

So, next time you and your friends walk past a blossoming tree, with lots of flowers on the ground, you can tell them who made that pretty scene possible, and you can look up and thank those foreigners.

On a more serious note, my thoughts and condolences are with my readers in Japan.