Another theory is that they escaped/were released from Ealing Studios at the end of filming. That might make sense as it was that area of west London that they first colonised.
When I lived in South West London the parakeets used to flock across from Richmond park to a tree in a much smaller park near me. Not sure why they liked it so much.
Here on the edge of a market town we get foxes, pigeons, sparrows and magpies very frequently. I've also seen deer in the field beyond our house, and we nearly collided with one early in the morning on the way to the airport the other week. We also get Canada geese flying across our houses from one pond to another in the winter. Bats are also pretty common and I once saw a hedgehog.
Rooks are a bit smaller than crows and look like they're wearing shorts - they also have dirty white patches around their beaks.
I've seen wrens, tits (blue, great, coal), robins, woodpigeons, goldfinches, and willow warblers (pretty sure it was them and not chiffchaffs) out of the back window that I can remember off the top of my head. There are sparrows down the road but they don't seem to like our end of the road so much. We live near one of the Edinburgh hills, so we can see various birds from time to time when we walk there - blackcaps, dippers one year, kestrels, dabchicks (not to mention more ubiquitous species): I have seen a buzzard from my front window.
As mammals go, there are foxes about, and the hill has rabbits and also bats (pipistrelles, both kinds, daubenton's - I know because I went on a bat walk one evening). I saw roe deer on the hill a couple of years ago and I once saw a weasel. I have also seen a dead badger in the road, though I've never seen signs of living badgers.
What you say about willow warblers is quite interesting. That's the opposite from round here - south west England. Here, the sound of chiffchaffs is a continual backdrop to any walk in the countryside from mid-March onwards. It feels as though they are everywhere. Small numbers, but only making a quiet little call, are even present in winter. Willow warblers, though, are quite scarce and if anything are more likely to be passing through, perhaps on their way to you.
There are many rabbits living on my property, and quite a few squirrels. Every now and then I see a chipmunk. There is also a groundhog which lives under my ground-level deck.
When I lived in South West London the parakeets used to flock across from Richmond park to a tree in a much smaller park near me. Not sure why they liked it so much.
The parakeets are probably just as much perplexed by your inability to instinctively know the difference.....
@Huia, thanks for the info about the swamp hens, I do think the NZ name for them is much prettier. I've been scared of birds all my life, with a special dislike of chooks. Since moving house a few years ago, I've tried to be much braver and am making the effort to use fewer chemicals in the garden as I've noticed how these birds pick at the nature strip and I'm not keen to be dealing with dead bodies!
I really love the coloured birds that visit our street tree and even the noisy cockatoos though I find their call a bit grating. I often wonder if dinosaurs sounded like them!
The little wrens that come to the garden are just such a delight flitting everywhere. The brown Mrs Wrens and the blue Mr Wrens never fail to make me smile!
When I listed the wildlife around here, in my post above, I forgot that there are skunks, and I've seen one. And of course the New York City Quaker parrots.
Now that we have a mountain lion sighted in the area we have received a list of things to do and not do. I had not given any thought to not feeding animals that mountain lions feed on thus attracting lions to your property. I found it interesting to be told not to approach a lion to take pictures. Are people that stupid? I am afraid some are.
As well as the animals mentioned above I forget the frogs, lots of them and a grass snake or two. I haven't seen them, but my husband saw one, thought it was the garden hose and was very surprised when it moved.
When I listed the wildlife around here, in my post above, I forgot that there are skunks, and I've seen one. And of course the New York City Quaker parrots.
I've taken the computer out in the garden, by the lotus pond. No doubt I'll regret it later (mosquitoes), but it's lovely out here now. All sorts of birds, cardinals and jays by the color and sound.
I've just been watching about half a dozen swifts looping madly round our front garden and pulling up to look into the 2 swift boxes on the house wall. Since the window I was looking through is between the boxes, I had a perfect view of it all.
Probably last year's hatchlings looking to see what's empty round here for next year.
As well as the animals mentioned above I forget the frogs, lots of them and a grass snake or two. I haven't seen them, but my husband saw one, thought it was the garden hose and was very surprised when it moved.
This weekend, there were reports of a cougar on our university campus. Now, our university is known as the Cougars, but this one is supposedly the real thing. One report was that it was near lambing sheds, but there have been no confirmed kills. Another said it was on the golf course. The Fish and Game sent out trackers yesterday and could not find any big cat in the vicinity, but you never know. Not thinking about running the links today.
I feel like a proud grandparent having fretted over five swans' eggs for five weeks ending about five weeks ago! Opposite the Leicester Rowing Club, on the Soar proper. They hungrily looked up to me this evening on the canal section.
Don't panic @Martin54. Swans aren't carnivores, don't see you as an appetising meal and aren't going to eat you.
I'd die happy if they did. But they can break your arm with their wings you know. Unlike dying unhappily of sodding borreliosis if the second round of antibiotics don't work against the 2-4 Ixodes ticks I've had in 4 months over 4 counties. Devon - where I pulled the huge bastard out by its legs, Gloucestershire - unproven, but scratched something tenacious out of my left gluteus maximus in the shower, Warwickshire - definite and you don't want to know, the picture would tell, and Leicestershire - a possible in my sodding shoe, abraded to grey goo. Waiting on serology results. Negatives prove nothing. How's that for wildlife? They are sodding EVERYWHERE. I'm buying 5L of citronella. Is that a tad Hadean? Do NOT pee in long grass.
They parasitize every mammal and passerine species.
Today I went into Bury by tram and two Muntjac deer were grazing on the cutting side. The tram stopped right next to them (I estimate no more than ten feet away) and the deer were totally unfazed by the tram and by the people looking at them through glass.
These deer were just a few hundred yards from the town centre of Bury. I was really amazed to see them in such a place.
I just saw a medium sized racoon on the sidewalk outside an empty, overgrown lot in Flushing, Queens, NYC. Of course we have lots of racoons in NYC, but you don't often see them just out and about during the day. I hope it wasn't sick, but it looked quite healthy.
One of the houses opposite has a pebble dashed wall. A couple of years ago we saw a grey squirrel spead itself out and climb up the wall onto the roof. After exploring the roof it walked down the wall.
The year is almost over and as usual, the only thing that made it to harvest was the Vietnamese veggies and squash. I have a theory that this stuff looks too "exotic" to our wild visitors to get eaten. They go for the peaches and tomatoes instead.
Oh dear @Lamb Chopped how frustrating. Of course they eat the things that we most enjoy!
Sunday afternoon was such a joy. I'd been worried that I had not seen any fairy wrens recently and suspected that some local cats may have been at work, but a pair came to our garden late in the afternoon, and lifted my spirits so much. The little blue male was very bold hopping right up close to the room I was in, sitting on the door-mat and his wife flitted around close by. Just wonderful!
I saw a new book in the library that had photos of birdlife un the local estuary. It was absolutely stunning so I picked it up to see the details as I was planning to buy it.
It didn't have blackscaups/papango which are the little diving ducks. Unlike the grey teal and the mallards they are smaller and shaped like the traditional bath plastic duck.
I can't understand why anyone would leave them out. Possibly they tried and the ducks kept diving.
Our family collection of bird photos consisted of trees that were all that was left when the birds had flown.
We arrived at the YMCA early this morning at the same time as a young raccoon. It shuffled up to the automatic front door, which obligingly opened, and carried on in. Some of us tried to encourage it to leave, but one of the staff just clapped her hands loudly, which seemed to work, and she chased it across the car park to the woods. It was a very bright morning, so we theorised that the building was relatively dark and it was looking for somewhere to sleep for the day. A raccoon that small should have been with its family, so the mother must have been nearby.
As to why I'm more botanical than zoological: plants don't fly away or hide in the compost heap from predators heard but not seen (rats, foxes). Looking out in to our postage stamp back yard I can name the nine species of plant I can see except the lawn grass. Which is a terrible confession. A fescue? Twenty two when I get put my nose up to the patio doors. The only birds are black, goldfinches on the TV aerials, pigeon including remains from sparrowhawk strike, tits blue and great. In my day I was a fanatic twitcher and still am on the north Norfolk coast heaven I haven't walked for a couple years now, and down the river, or rather upriver as I dawdle on my way home. Although I have been arrested by a solitary greenfinch among the pairs of goldfinches, gooin' work as we say in sunny Leicester. We have such an impoverished fauna and flora in the UK. The Soar is still a green artery running through Leicester. The plants are a delight; subtle, very Britishly understated, early spring wonders like rue leaved saxifrage only on the canal bank stone edge, now gipsywort going over, orange jewel weed in the swathes of reed and Himalayan balsam, swamping even the willowherbs, on which I'm just starting to gorge. There was a single, magnificent bidens a couple of years ago, in the slope of a weir. The water pennywort is late exploding this year. I have followed the successive flowering of white umbellifers from cow parsley through hogweed to angelica via hemlock, goutweed, carrot...
I ventured in to an overgrown dip that had no brambles or nettles and was blown away by a breathtaking single, solitary sulphur cinquefoil.
The Swan family quins are doing fine. Their home shared with single pairs of grey wagtails and cormorants, a host of black headed and herring gulls, moorhen, coot, mallard, Canada snow geese, solitary egrets and cousin heron. And a single white fronted goose. A phenomenon seen a mile away on Braunstone Ponds. Where I saw a cormorant go for a snow goose gosling and have the shit pecked and wing beaten out of it by a parent for its failed pains. It skulked off and worried a mallard duck and her sole surviving 'ling. Up on the hill there was the best stand of smooth sow thistle I have ever seen. Near the brides feathers and hemp-agrimony. On the way up to the gooseberries. The hill where the rose ring-necked parakeets squawk in the treetops that tree creepers climb, above the handkerchief trees. Zoology? I have seen a scurry of squirrels, a rare collective.
I digress. Way upriver there are no buzzards this year, but a single blackcap stared back at me from ten feet. Then the swallows do RAF flypasts under the canal bridge where the herons stand beyond and large fish leap provocatively after mayflies. At work a group of us are hard core Swifties. We have screaming nest boxes.
Turning off the river path home uphill, chiffchaffs call in the spring in the re-wilding hinterland of railway (the 1832 Leicester and Swannington) and the Guthlaxton Way. I have found over two hundred tree and shrub varieties in Leicester. Including the most southerly species on Earth. I just gots to know. So now I have to know every gutter weed. I love them all. Gallant soldier. Pellitory-of-the-wall. Overlooked treasures.
Do you not have scads of squirrels, then? Around here they come in armies, and when the Osage oranges fall and turn alcoholic, they are drunk armies. It's a sight to be seen.
I live in south Alabama, USA and so it’s a hot spot for biodiversity. Recently came across the eastern hog nose snake. Known for making its head really flat and playing dead. Quite funny. Loved handling it.
Favorite snakes I’ve handled though was a six foot gray rat snake and a three foot eastern mud snake.
A gray tree frog has been visiting our back porch for weeks, singing. I can never see the little fella, though. When I can see them, they're beautiful -- gray or brown depending on the background, and almost snow white underneath, with neon yellow stripes under their armpits and at the groin area.
For being such small animals, they are incredibly loud singers.
We have many cute little lizards. I am so thankful the dog shows no interest. When I water the plants, they will often run out to the damp, seeming unafraid of me.
Oh yes, lizards! Oddly enough some areas of Queens have Italian Wall Lizards as an invasive species, and I have seen a few in the Queens Botanical Gardens.
We have 3 species in the fauna impoverished UK. Common, sand and legless, not drunk; the slow worm. I saw one common scurry under a board walk on the approach to Clougha 10 year ago, and then eyeball me back from under.
Do you not have scads of squirrels, then? Around here they come in armies, and when the Osage oranges fall and turn alcoholic, they are drunk armies. It's a sight to be seen.
Aye, we have yourn. I stood by a red squirrel licking a Mars Bar wrapper in a litter bin on Ingleborough 50 year ago.
Do you not have scads of squirrels, then? Around here they come in armies, and when the Osage oranges fall and turn alcoholic, they are drunk armies. It's a sight to be seen.
Aye, we have yourn. I stood by a red squirrel licking a Mars Bar wrapper in a litter bin on Ingleborough 50 year ago.
Any fox squirrels? The quintessential squirrel in my part of the world. In the last 30 years the red and grey squirrels have invaded from farther north in the state, competing for resources with our chubby, sumptuously-tailed, cheeky fox squirrels.
When I was growing up, they would run along the lines over the back yard, and chatter at the dogs, just driving them crazy.
Hubby tosses peanuts to them as we take our State Employee Constitutionals together on our breaks. They're so silly. The squirrels, I mean.
I was swimming yesterday when I saw a honey bee struggling in the pool. Not having anything to catch him with, I scooped him up in my hand. I took him over to the pool's edge and put him down. I went back to swimming and noted that he had not flown away. I returned to him and noticed that he was using his leg to wipe his face without thinking about it; I started speaking softly to him. I went back to swimming, returning several times to encourage him. After some time, he walked to the pool's edge and took off. He was a little bee, and I was a human, but I felt we had a moment together. It made me happy for the rest of the afternoon. Having been stung several times as a child, I was once terrified of bees, and I am surprised I put one on my hand .
Do you not have scads of squirrels, then? Around here they come in armies, and when the Osage oranges fall and turn alcoholic, they are drunk armies. It's a sight to be seen.
Aye, we have yourn. I stood by a red squirrel licking a Mars Bar wrapper in a litter bin on Ingleborough 50 year ago.
Any fox squirrels? The quintessential squirrel in my part of the world. In the last 30 years the red and grey squirrels have invaded from farther north in the state, competing for resources with our chubby, sumptuously-tailed, cheeky fox squirrels.
When I was growing up, they would run along the lines over the back yard, and chatter at the dogs, just driving them crazy.
Hubby tosses peanuts to them as we take our State Employee Constitutionals together on our breaks. They're so silly. The squirrels, I mean.
You have 11 species and we have two, one of which is yours! Which has 99% displaced ours! Our poor (macro-)fauna!
Well at least we have snail eating flies and our impoverished (macro-)flora means I can make a start on it. The river helps by affording microhabitats; a path ramps up along the towpath (it's canalized) and at eye height one has delighted in the forest, nay jungle, of umbrella liverwort (Marchantia polymorpha). One just has to go small, not just a jeweller's loupe, but a phone microscope attachment. For the trichomes. Leaf hairs are essential for Poland and Clement level ID. Not for the bryophytes obviously. Grasses (Hubbard) awaits my proper retirement. Ha!
It was a bedewed March morning in '22, I was exploring hinterlands on me bike, when at my feet in the Asda car park verge, a sea of tiny flowers washed over me, common whitlow grass, with the excellent Serbo-Croat sounding binomial name Draba verna. The treasures we overlook for too many decades.
Going small reminds me of skippers, the butterflies, some of which are distinguished by the colour of their antennae. Strangely enough, we get them on our allotment, either common or Essex skipper. I can just about see the colour of the tips.
I had to nick out to my car yesterday afternoon and noticed near the front door, that something had been snipping off bits of my roses, which have put out nice new spring growth.
I think I've seen the culprit today, but I didn't catch them in the act. A gorgeous crimson rosella was enjoying sitting in the midst of the new reddish coloured leaves. I pushed my phone between the curtains and took a few quick snaps. I'm surprised that it didn't fly away, just sat their boldly as though it was posing for my photos. Sadly I didn't get great photos, but loved seeing one so close to the house. Normally they stick to the street trees, but obviously felt safe enough to come close, today.
Returning from my allotment yesterday, I spotted in the nearby lake what I briefly thought was an albino heron before I realised it must be an egret of some sort. Looks as though it's a great white egret, which have been spotted in the area. May have to take the camera today and see if it's still there.
I'm looking at where there's always at least one now. And there isn't. Black headed and lesser black backed gulls, not herring, of the marine. One of the latter vexed with a plastic bottle.
I went for a hobble around Smalley churchyard and over the fields to Morley in Derbyshire this morning. I saw adders, grass snakes, a couple of common lizards, a newt or two and overhead I was followed by a red kite. I think they are all struggling with the sudden drop in temperature, according to my rucksack thermometer it was seven degrees. That's normally a December or January temperature around here.
I'm up at our place in Maine this month and there is a small group (too small for a flock) of black capped chickadees that like to look for food around the very large willow outside the kitchen windows. They are very striking and extremely acrobatic!
I'm still waiting for my first moose sighting, though--I mean, I've been coming up here for 21 years now and still zilch!
This morning I saw a pileated woodpecker on my old oak tree out back! They have come to that tree off and on for several years now, and they just make me happy! Red-bellied woodpeckers have been in that tree many times, but I haven't seen but one red-headed woodpecker in several years, but it was near my daughter's home and not in my back yard.
On Sunday we had a roe deer come and investigate our cricket match, it grazed just outside the boundary for the best part of an hour before it decided enough people with dogs had come by, and it wandered off.
Just started to notice early bird song, especially dunnock and wrens. By gum, it means spring is around the corner. Of course, the parakeets are screeching, and I expect Egypyian geese are looking for nests, also rooks. If you saw Winterwatch, you will have seen Chris looking at a bunch of chiff-chaffs, over-wintering. Gordon Bennett.
Comments
Here on the edge of a market town we get foxes, pigeons, sparrows and magpies very frequently. I've also seen deer in the field beyond our house, and we nearly collided with one early in the morning on the way to the airport the other week. We also get Canada geese flying across our houses from one pond to another in the winter. Bats are also pretty common and I once saw a hedgehog.
The parakeets are probably just as much perplexed by your inability to instinctively know the difference.....
I really love the coloured birds that visit our street tree and even the noisy cockatoos though I find their call a bit grating. I often wonder if dinosaurs sounded like them!
The little wrens that come to the garden are just such a delight flitting everywhere. The brown Mrs Wrens and the blue Mr Wrens never fail to make me smile!
Now people go 'Ooh! Selfie!'
Do the parrots observe Quaker silence?
I've taken the computer out in the garden, by the lotus pond. No doubt I'll regret it later (mosquitoes), but it's lovely out here now. All sorts of birds, cardinals and jays by the color and sound.
Probably last year's hatchlings looking to see what's empty round here for next year.
I'd die happy if they did. But they can break your arm with their wings you know. Unlike dying unhappily of sodding borreliosis if the second round of antibiotics don't work against the 2-4 Ixodes ticks I've had in 4 months over 4 counties. Devon - where I pulled the huge bastard out by its legs, Gloucestershire - unproven, but scratched something tenacious out of my left gluteus maximus in the shower, Warwickshire - definite and you don't want to know, the picture would tell, and Leicestershire - a possible in my sodding shoe, abraded to grey goo. Waiting on serology results. Negatives prove nothing. How's that for wildlife? They are sodding EVERYWHERE. I'm buying 5L of citronella. Is that a tad Hadean? Do NOT pee in long grass.
They parasitize every mammal and passerine species.
These deer were just a few hundred yards from the town centre of Bury. I was really amazed to see them in such a place.
Sunday afternoon was such a joy. I'd been worried that I had not seen any fairy wrens recently and suspected that some local cats may have been at work, but a pair came to our garden late in the afternoon, and lifted my spirits so much. The little blue male was very bold hopping right up close to the room I was in, sitting on the door-mat and his wife flitted around close by. Just wonderful!
It didn't have blackscaups/papango which are the little diving ducks. Unlike the grey teal and the mallards they are smaller and shaped like the traditional bath plastic duck.
I can't understand why anyone would leave them out. Possibly they tried and the ducks kept diving.
Our family collection of bird photos consisted of trees that were all that was left when the birds had flown.
I ventured in to an overgrown dip that had no brambles or nettles and was blown away by a breathtaking single, solitary sulphur cinquefoil.
The Swan family quins are doing fine. Their home shared with single pairs of grey wagtails and cormorants, a host of black headed and herring gulls, moorhen, coot, mallard, Canada snow geese, solitary egrets and cousin heron. And a single white fronted goose. A phenomenon seen a mile away on Braunstone Ponds. Where I saw a cormorant go for a snow goose gosling and have the shit pecked and wing beaten out of it by a parent for its failed pains. It skulked off and worried a mallard duck and her sole surviving 'ling. Up on the hill there was the best stand of smooth sow thistle I have ever seen. Near the brides feathers and hemp-agrimony. On the way up to the gooseberries. The hill where the rose ring-necked parakeets squawk in the treetops that tree creepers climb, above the handkerchief trees. Zoology? I have seen a scurry of squirrels, a rare collective.
I digress. Way upriver there are no buzzards this year, but a single blackcap stared back at me from ten feet. Then the swallows do RAF flypasts under the canal bridge where the herons stand beyond and large fish leap provocatively after mayflies. At work a group of us are hard core Swifties. We have screaming nest boxes.
Turning off the river path home uphill, chiffchaffs call in the spring in the re-wilding hinterland of railway (the 1832 Leicester and Swannington) and the Guthlaxton Way. I have found over two hundred tree and shrub varieties in Leicester. Including the most southerly species on Earth. I just gots to know. So now I have to know every gutter weed. I love them all. Gallant soldier. Pellitory-of-the-wall. Overlooked treasures.
(dropping the tone a bit)
Do you not have scads of squirrels, then? Around here they come in armies, and when the Osage oranges fall and turn alcoholic, they are drunk armies. It's a sight to be seen.
Favorite snakes I’ve handled though was a six foot gray rat snake and a three foot eastern mud snake.
For being such small animals, they are incredibly loud singers.
Aye, we have yourn. I stood by a red squirrel licking a Mars Bar wrapper in a litter bin on Ingleborough 50 year ago.
Any fox squirrels? The quintessential squirrel in my part of the world. In the last 30 years the red and grey squirrels have invaded from farther north in the state, competing for resources with our chubby, sumptuously-tailed, cheeky fox squirrels.
When I was growing up, they would run along the lines over the back yard, and chatter at the dogs, just driving them crazy.
Hubby tosses peanuts to them as we take our State Employee Constitutionals together on our breaks. They're so silly. The squirrels, I mean.
You have 11 species and we have two, one of which is yours! Which has 99% displaced ours! Our poor (macro-)fauna!
Well at least we have snail eating flies and our impoverished (macro-)flora means I can make a start on it. The river helps by affording microhabitats; a path ramps up along the towpath (it's canalized) and at eye height one has delighted in the forest, nay jungle, of umbrella liverwort (Marchantia polymorpha). One just has to go small, not just a jeweller's loupe, but a phone microscope attachment. For the trichomes. Leaf hairs are essential for Poland and Clement level ID. Not for the bryophytes obviously. Grasses (Hubbard) awaits my proper retirement. Ha!
It was a bedewed March morning in '22, I was exploring hinterlands on me bike, when at my feet in the Asda car park verge, a sea of tiny flowers washed over me, common whitlow grass, with the excellent Serbo-Croat sounding binomial name Draba verna. The treasures we overlook for too many decades.
I think I've seen the culprit today, but I didn't catch them in the act. A gorgeous crimson rosella was enjoying sitting in the midst of the new reddish coloured leaves. I pushed my phone between the curtains and took a few quick snaps. I'm surprised that it didn't fly away, just sat their boldly as though it was posing for my photos. Sadly I didn't get great photos, but loved seeing one so close to the house. Normally they stick to the street trees, but obviously felt safe enough to come close, today.
I'm still waiting for my first moose sighting, though--I mean, I've been coming up here for 21 years now and still zilch!