Wednesday 14th May

We have a rather pretty lake at the bottom of our garden here on the Isle of Dogs.  Well it is called a lake but it is really two connected ponds.  It was constructed out of a dry dock when the houses around the lake were built, about thirty years ago.  It has fish (introduced) and water lilies and is also inhabited by dragon flies and ducks and moorhens.  Each year we look forward to the baby ducklings, but for the last three years we have only had moorhen chicks.  It seems these smaller water fowl are squeezing the ducks out of the lake.  But they still hang around, duckling-less and looking a bit lost.

They do the strangest of things.  They are often to be seen on the rooves of the three storey houses and this morning there were three of them, two males and a female sitting in the middle of the road.  I walked right up to them and they didn’t budge.  They looked as though they were having a sleep, heads tucked in to the feathers on their shoulders.  I just hope the few car-drivers in our road avoided or managed to wake and scare them.

They were here long before us.  The Island used to be marshland and has been I suspect a habitat for ducks, geese and other wading birds for millennia.  We have managed to squeeze them out almost everywhere, but at least our little lake offers some refuge in the city for them.