The stealth ducklings…

Picture the scene. Art student daughter and I are getting into photography this summer. I love landscapes because they don’t move. She’s loved birds all her life so she's going the hard route and I try to follow her.

The park is full of baby birds, so she’s in heaven at the moment and so am I, and on Friday we had a brilliant idea to walk through the park, then go under Keyhole Bridge ,(close to where Esther lives in my Esther and the Professor books.) and then walk back along Whitecliff, through the Parkstone Bay nature reserve.

So, there we are, down by the freshwater lake, enjoying the shade when we saw these beautiful young moor hens who we’ve watched since they looked like those toys I used to make with pompoms. I haven’t seen them before this year because, bluntly, the herons usually get them. Here they are, and they’re fun to watch because they haven’t got the memo about being shy and avoiding humans.

Daughter was busy photographing and adjusting and doing all that sort of stuff when I realised that stealthily, quietly and calmly, the ducklings were approaching, and they only had one plan in mind. That’s right. The grain tub was unattended and didn’t have the lid on it.

It reminded me of a time long, long ago when we were out in the park as a family, and my daughter started complaining that her brother kept prodding her. Which was odd, given that her brother was running ahead of us… So I looked more closely and a swan was ever so gently prodding her with his beak because he knew she’d fed him. And then there was the time that an enterprising greylag goose poked a hole in her grain bag with his beak and followed contentedly along behind her as he ate.

So many happy memories, and more made today with this new walk, and wasn’t the Harbour beautiful? I was still thinking of it on VE Day and before that on Dunkirk and D-Day, and the peace was incredible and precious, so I’m sharing it with you now and hoping you’ll find your own peaceful places till we meet again on Tuesday.