Читать книгу The Times A Year in Nature Notes - Derwent May - Страница 27

THERE ARE MANY tufted ducks on lakes and large ponds at the moment. The drakes stand out with their black bodies and silvery-white flanks. If they roll over to preen, they look almost completely white. The females are brown birds, but they too have lighter, yellowish flanks.

Both sexes have bright golden eyes, and a little ponytail of drooping feathers at the back of the head. They are diving ducks, leaping forward when they go under and spending much of their time beneath the surface. In the next few weeks some of the tufted ducks that came here for the winter will be heading further north again. Sometimes a drake that was a winter visitor takes one of our native females with him.

In the bare wild rose bushes, a large gall called robin’s pincushion, or bedeguar gall, is noticeable now. In the autumn it was a ball of bright pink, tangled hairs but by now some of the hairs have fallen out and most of the others have turned black. The larvae of a small gall wasp are still inside the ball and will emerge as wasps themselves in May. A few rotting red or black hips also linger on the thorny wild rose twigs.