Peanut Patch Updates

Talk on various birdy sites about this new cold weather maybe inducing some interesting bird movement had me out walking the work patch this lunchtime. I figured I was definitely in line for something like a smew coming upriver, what with the weather being so extreme and everything.

I was wrong, of course. But I did get a peregrine flying onto Tower Bridge, and so far as I'm aware, it's still sitting there now, waiting out this "snow". I'm perfectly happy that correlation and causation are pretty much the same thing, no matter what xkcd or anyone else tells you, and if you were to draw a graph showing a relationship between "peregrines resting on the south face of the south tower of Tower Bridge at lunch time" and "snowing" you'd see that there is a 100% relationship. So I guess this weather front has provided. Whatever. It's 2012 Peanut Challenge bird number 29 and only my second sighting of this species on patch.

I took a photo, which you can see below. You know things are bad when you have to label which bit of the picture is the bird. It's even worse than Lethbridge's phone-camera'd effort from a few days ago, which you can see below below and is at least recognisable as a bird.

Hope he doesn't mind me posting it. I pro watermarked it just in case.

I also saw two mallards doing teh sex, which is only notable because it was a relatively civilised affair: there were only the two of them, no gang rape (googled pic) she was actually a she and definitely alive, and had given what looked like grudging acceptance, if not total consent, with only a bare minimum of head biting and drowning by way of coercion. So yes, notable, as mallards are usually bastards.

Back to the cold weather. I predict this, on patch, tomorrow.

And while I'm talking patch, late one evening last week I had three swans over the Tower itself. Technically they and I were off patch, so no matter what species they are it's fairly irrelevant to me and my peanuts, but I think they were Bewick's. Thank god they weren't on patch, huh?