The male wood pigeon’s display as he follows the female around the lawn, includes short bunny hops, jumping an inch in the air and an inch forward. He then makes a series of deep, polite bows.
How can she resist him? She glances at him with embarrassed coyness and goes on pecking at the spilt sunflower hearts beneath the feeders.
Arboretum
On our regular walks around Newmillerdam Lake, I’ll often take the upper path via the arboretum, while Barbara and her brother stick to the lakeside. We were a bit later starting today, so, change of plan, I headed straight for the Lakeside Cafe, where I sketched the stone-built house over my latte and flapjack, before heading clockwise past the war memorial and meeting up with Barbara and her brother at the boathouse, near the end of their anticlockwise circuit of the lake.
Most in evidence today, tufted ducks dotted ten or twenty yards from the shore, hunkering down from the cool breeze blowing up the valley, in an area where we often see them diving for freshwater mussels.