Driving from our home in Portsmouth to the west coast of Wales, as we did in 2011 for our Welsh short break, is certainly doable in one go without any stops, but it’s not sensible, it’s not big, and there was no need for it so we didn’t.
We didn’t have any firm plans on the drive up but we were on the lookout for anything of interest just to give us a chance to stretch our legs and as we were heading along the A40 in the vicinity of Bourton-on-the-Water we spotted a sign for Birdland. This was where we took a break.
This post will feature some photographs of some of the birds we saw. As I’m not a birder or twitcher or ornithologist or even vaguely knowledgeable about birds in general there’s not going to be anything remotely interesting to mention about them, and I won’t even guess at some of the species. Do we like seeing birds when we travel? Yes. Do we notice birds we’ve not seen before? Yes. Do we have a clue what they are other than birds? Absolutely not. Is this waffle just to pad out the text content of this post so it’s not just entirely a set of pictures of birds all labelled as “Bird”? Maybe.
You’ll notice a lot of photos of penguins here. The main reason for this is that my wife really likes penguins. They are interesting, it’s true, but they do pong a bit to my sensitive nose. Birdland has England’s only King Penguins. They’re very similar to Emperor Penguins but are constrained to ruling over a single land by Antarctic decree.
To finish, a couple of photographs I was very pleased with, getting enough sharpness on the eyes and a shallow enough depth of field for bokeh plus some interesting texture effects caused by shooting through a wire mesh. A parrot – which you could probably tell even if you had the same bird knowledge levels as me on account of its general parrotness – and, below that, a black-throated laughingthrush. Yes, I did have to point my phone at the picture and get it to identify the bird. Yes, I could have done that with all the birds. But so could you.
