Things you might not expect to see in a London park...

[ffutures]

A photo I took on Friday evening - this is at the extreme zoom of the Fuji, and it shows a little, there's some fringing around things. The first picture is reduced in size, the second is a crop from the middle.







It's one of the red-necked parakeets that have have become a naturalised British species, of course, the first time I've managed to get a photo. I saw three more or less simultaneously, this was the only one that landed where I could get a picture, the others vanished into the leaves. Since I could only see it as a blob in the viewfinder I wasn't able to get a better picture; this is the clearest, and none of the others show its head any better.

Comments

[frostfox.livejournal.com]

Cool!!!

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

They're apparently a bit of a pest, though not as bad as squirrels.

[sbisson.livejournal.com]

Drunk Parrot has been a regular visitor to the gardens round here. Turns out they love elderberries, and also that they ferment in their stomachs. So they get drunk, fly badly, and get oddly aggressive with other birds that are trying to eat the same berries...

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

I think Gerald Durrell described something similar in one of his books. Though not in the UK, of course.

[pauldormer.livejournal.com]

A few years ago, my sister and her partner were down in London visiting my brother. You may recall the first weekend of October 2011 was unseasonably warm and Sunday evening they were sitting on the balcony of his flat drinking G&Ts. A flock of parakeets flew past. They felt like they were in the tropics.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Fairly common near most London parks now - they like open space so you don't see them in gardens much.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Actually my sister tells me they are turning up in gardens too and scaring off the native birds.