white_hart

It was cold and frosty in the Parks this morning. I walked the long way round to work, through Parson's Pleasure and along the arm of the Cherwell that runs behind St Catherine's; in Parson's Pleasure, I startled the heron that perches near the rollers. It flapped across the river and settled in a fallen tree on the other side where it sat looking cold and grumpy.

A heron with its head hunched down to its shoulders and its wings mantled around it, standing on the moss-covered limb of a fallen tree with the split trunk behind it. The moss and the branches in the background are covered in thick frost.

I think this is probably one of my favourite photos I've ever taken.

This picture, taken on my walk at lunchtime, is not a particularly good photo, but on the other hand, it is a photo of OTTERS which makes up for a lot.

A riverbank with tree roots and dead grasses above murky green water. On the left hand side you can just see the head of an otter beneath a tree root; to the right, another pokes its head between stems of grass.

I was walking along the riverside path when I spotted them splashing on the far side. There are two in the photo, though I thought there might actually have been three of them. I was standing there with my camera (having for once remembered that switching it to continuous would be the sensible thing) when an elderly man who was sitting on Tolkien's memorial bench with a small white dog asked if it had a zoom, because there was some kind of mammal on the other side of the river. I said I thought it was an otter, and we both watched them for a few minutes while lots of other lunchtime walkers passed us, entirely uncurious as to what we might be looking at, and totally unaware that they, too, could have been watching otters.

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julian

Otter! Yay otters!

But I love the heron. That folded up grimness. (Also, it's a good line of feathers on its visible wings.)

white_hart

I was amazed how well the picture came out.

hilarita

Yay otters! Otters!

OTTERS!

cmcmck

Great pics! :o)

Thank you!

oracne

Heron! Otters!

:-)

danieldwilliam

I like herons very much.

So do I. And not just because they tend to stand very still and are therefore about the easiest birds to photograph.

machiavellijr

The city seems to have had a lot of otters lately. There was an enormous one quite cheerfully eating its breakfast on a boathouse raft last week, oblivious to the bystanders a couple of yards away taking photos. I wondered if there was something wrong with it but it finished eating its fish and swam away, apparently quite happy.

Oh, wow! I just saw Magdalen College tweeting asking people to let them know if they saw any along Addison's Walk so they could install ottercams, too.