Trabia Garden

Oh, I should show you guys the exciting duck I saw!

On Christmas Eve, I went to meet my parents at a pub. Before going in, I took a moment to look at the birds on the pond outside.

One bird, swimming towards me, caught my eye. Its colouring puzzled me; it felt unfamiliar. I couldn't work out what it was from this distance.

As it got closer, I exclaimed aloud, involuntarily, 'Oh, what a beautiful duck!'


The exciting duck is the one on the right! It was clearly a female mallard, but I'd never seen a mallard like this before. Their feathers are usually a duller, darker brown, and they don't have those large white patches. You can see an ordinary female mallard in the upper right of this photo I took of a couple of Mandarin ducks:


Mandarin ducks are also pretty exciting, of course! The prettiest duck. But I was fascinated by this bright mallard; they're such familiar birds to me, but I had no idea they could look like this.

I whipped out my phone to see if I could find out anything about light brown mallards. Apparently it's called a blonde or leucistic mallard, and the colouring is due to genetic loss of pigmentation! Blonde mallards seem to be very rare, although I can't find any reliable information on exactly how rare; the Internet has turned up numbers ranging from one in 30,000 to the extremely implausible-sounding one in 165,000.

Regardless of the exact probability of seeing a blonde mallard, I'm very glad I was lucky enough to see one; she's so pretty!


Bonus birds: a couple of swans came right up to me, demanding to know why I was photographing a common duck and not them. I was so captivated by my mallard that I failed to photograph the swans when they were up close, but I did manage to get the moment they turned and departed in disgust. (The closer of the swans is in its awkward teenage stage, which is why its colouring is so patchy.)

It was my birthday yesterday! I went with my parents to the London Wetland Centre, a little nature reserve where you can see a thrilling variety of waterfowl.

I spotted over thirty different species of bird! Some were ones I often see around London; some were rarer sights. Many of them were entirely new to me!

The birds I remember (and could establish the names of; I have no idea what some of the cool birds I saw were called), starting with the familiar and progressing to 'wait, what's that??': pigeon, mallard, coot, moorhen, crow, seagull, tufted duck, rose-ringed parakeet, heron, stork, some sort of huge grey crane with a red patch on its head (probably a common crane), goldeneye, bufflehead, smew, hooded merganser, red-breasted goose, great crested grebe, Cape teal, Cape Barren goose (this was so huge!), white-faced whistling duck, fulvous whistling duck, white-headed duck. The name 'white-headed duck' was a surprise to us; we found its blue bill a lot more distinctive!

My favourite sightings:

- We saw a family of moorhens: two parents, three chicks. The chicks were little balls of black fluff with comically tiny stubs of wings. They must have barely hatched; there were still unhatched eggs in the nest!

- I spotted a large cloud of seagulls from a hide, wheeling around. I usually see gulls moving separately, even when they're flying in large numbers; it was interesting to see them all moving together, like starlings. I was too far from them to determine the type of gull, but they were great to watch!

- The great crested grebe was so large and serene, just floating there in the water. Very handsome bird!

- The white-faced whistling duck was perhaps my favourite new bird discovery. According to the information board, they form very strong bonds and call out to their mate if they're separated. And, indeed, we saw two pairs of white-faced whistling ducks, each travelling around as a duo, rather than lone birds. One of the pairs sat facing each other in the grass, their necks forming a little heart shape as they nuzzled each other. 'Did you see them kissing?' my mum asked, deeply charmed.

- I saw an otter! An Asian small-clawed otter, specifically, swimming in the water and climbing on logs and squiggling around on the earth. It looked like it was having fun!


In the evening, I had a delicious Victoria sponge Rei had made for me, and I watched Weathering with You with my housemates. I've actually owned this film for a year and a half, but this is the first time I've seen it! For a long time I didn't have the nerve to watch Weathering with You, because I loved Shinkai's earlier film Your Name so much that I was worried I'd just resent it for not being Your Name.

I needn't have worried; I had a great time with Weathering with You! I don't love it as much as I love Your Name, of course, but I didn't expect to, and I still really enjoyed it in its own right. Stunning to look at, and it very much succeeded at getting me invested. It was a real rollercoaster of a film; it felt like the plot went zooming off in a new direction every few minutes. I was so startled when a gun came into play; it didn't feel like it was going to be a film with a gun in it!

At one point the protagonist Hodaka fires the gun, almost hitting someone with it, and I would be fascinated to see how events would have played out if he actually had shot that guy. It was so nearly a very different film!


necrophilia, who is incredible, gave me six months of Dreamwidth paid time for my birthday! Suddenly I'm swimming in icon space! I'm very excited about this.

This also, of course, means that I have the ability to make polls. Brace yourselves.

If you've been following this journal for a while, you've probably got an idea of what I talk about. I talk about videogames; I talk about television; I talk about my family and friends; I occasionally talk about language or writing.

Here is a load of rambling about birds.

I am by no means a bird expert or a serious birdwatcher, so I can't actually say anything insightful; I just like birds. They're cool, varied little living creatures that pop up all over the place, and it's fun to watch them move!

Here is an assortment of birds I've seen in London, and some brief thoughts on each of them. This is not a list of every bird I've seen in London; it's just the birds that came to mind while I was writing this entry. I'm still thinking of others, but it's too late; I've written the entry now! Sorry, thrush.

I don't know if any of this is worth reading, unless you're queenlua, but sometimes you just have to talk about birds.


( My thoughts on the birds of London. )


I've just realised I haven't even got into water birds! But this entry is already too long, so I'll set those aside for now. I will mention, however, that a year ago I looked out of my window, saw a heron in flight, and for a moment I genuinely thought, I know dragons don't exist, but I have no idea what else that could be.

I'm on holiday in Italy! Felt a bit perverse to be writing Lost fanfiction on the plane, if I'm honest.

The sky in Italy feels bigger than it does in England, somehow. It's a feeling I get in America, too; the sky seems huge. Maybe it's because being able to see far-off hills or mountains gives a sense of scale and distance, and much of England is relatively flat. Maybe it's just the awareness that you're standing on a huge continent, instead of a small island.

I played badminton with my brother while the sun set over the hills in the background. We'd found a bucket of cheap falling-apart shuttlecocks, and our game was half actual playing and half just watching in fascination as the shuttlecocks increasingly disintegrated.

Lots of little lizards around the place, which are always exciting. Apparently the UK does have lizards, but I don't think I've ever seen one at home.

I saw a little glowing creature hiding in a crack in a wall! A firefly larva, maybe, or a glowworm? I'd never seen any luminescent creature outside an aquarium before and was so puzzled to see a little green light in the wall; I was very excited to realise it was a living thing, rather than, say, a camera spying on us. Extremely cool!

Later, my brother pointed out that there were adult fireflies about! Little bright flashing lights moving through the dark! Again, I had never seen fireflies and actually seeing them in action is incredible. How can living things light up so brightly?

Lots of butterflies! Mainly species you'd see back in the UK - large and small whites, meadow browns, some beautiful little holly blues - but earlier today I caught sight of a scarce swallowtail in flight. Some sort of lovely fritillary that wouldn't let me get close enough to get a good look, but maybe a Queen of Spain fritillary? There was also a butterfly I thought was a meadow brown until it opened its wings and I realised its oranges were much more exciting; looking it up, I think it was a small copper.

(When I last went to Thorpe Park with RD, I kept exclaiming over the birds and butterflies we saw there - a wagtail! a brimstone! - and eventually she demanded to know how I knew their names. The answer is mainly my dad; he likes being able to identify birds, and we'll sometimes go out butterfly-spotting in the summer.)

Some lovely jays and swallows, and a magnificent pheasant strutting across the road in front of us. My most striking bird sighting of late was actually the day before the holiday, though; I was watching a family of coots when a heron swept in, grabbed one of the babies and flew away with it. 'Oh, Jesus!' I exclaimed aloud, involuntarily. I was so torn between 'that was a cool moment of nature in action and I'm lucky I was there to see it' and 'that was awful and now I'm sad'.

The weather is variable here, but that's no downside; it just means we can see the surrounding forested hills in different conditions. Right now, as I write these lines, I'm taking shelter from an intense downpour in the middle of bright sunshine, and it is astonishingly pretty.

Sometimes the rain falls so thickly it looks like static over the landscape, like we're in some sort of beautiful green Silent Hill. I very much hope we're not in Silent Hill, but, if we are, at least it looks good.

'There's another loo past baggage reclaim,' my mum points out.

'Yes, of course there are Toulouse,' I say.

I am escorted out of France.


Over the weekend, I attended my brother Joseph's wedding! In France, which was experiencing an intense heatwave.

'Thank you all for joining us for our wedding in Hell,' Joseph greeted us in his speech. It was nearly 40°C. He turned to his bride. 'Eleanor, you're looking incredible. I think we can all agree that there are two extreme heat events in the south of France today.'

Shakira's 'Whenever, Wherever' played at the end of the ceremony, as the bride and groom walked up the aisle together. Incredible choice.

Joseph and Eleanor were told to feed each other the first bite of wedding cake 'gently and lovingly' and just mashed it into each other's faces simultaneously. They both had the same idea independently and have no idea who struck first. Truly made for each other.

Prior to the wedding, we were staying near a mountain that had the same name as my dad. Mum suggested that we climb it.

Dad: You want to climb to the top of the mountain?
Mum: I feel we should, as it's your name.
Dad: Bloody lucky I'm not called Everest.

Our flight back was cancelled, so we were trapped in Toulouse for two days, but there are worse places to be trapped! It gave us the opportunity to have a meal with the newlyweds, and I spent some time reading in a nice little park - the Parc du Grand Noble - which had avenues of trees and an interesting fountain you could stand inside. If you went there in the morning, you could see rabbits; they seemed to live under the wooden walkways.

There was a lot of cool wildlife on this trip, actually! I hadn't seen hummingbird hawk-moths before, and they're fascinatingly strange; they're moths that look like hummingbirds. I had seen scarce swallowtails before, but they're still very cool; they're butterflies with wings that seem to be set backwards and have false antennae at the bottom, to confuse predators, so they look upside-down when they're feeding on flowers. A lot of little lizards, one of which crawled onto Eleanor's hand during the wedding meal, and she was so excited she went around the tables to show everyone her new friend.

At one point we caught a glimpse of wild boar piglets trotting across the road; they were little and stripy and cute as hell. A bat fluttered over and over my head, drawing constant restless figures-of-eight against the dusk sky. We watched house martins flitting into their nests in the eaves; we watched swallows blizzarding around a town square. I'd never seen birds move like that: flying around in large numbers, but all moving as individuals, not as a flock.

As a final note, two different people at the wedding introduced themselves to me with 'HI, I'M INTO FANFICTION AND I WAS TOLD TO TALK TO YOU.' It was pretty great.