Parks of London #1: Waterlow Park

First, a photo of my breakfast this morning:

All from the farmers market! I haven't seen cherries at the markets I've been to in New England, so this was pretty exciting. This was also my first time trying homemade, organic yog(h)urt (ingredients: cow's milk, probiotic cultures). It tasted kind of like...cheese. By which I mean, it was delicious.
Anyway, back to yesterday's London adventure, which was a visit to Waterlow park, a lovely park between us and our very posh neighbor to the North, Highgate. Waterlow park has everything a great urban park should have: bodies of water for waterfowl and other wildlife, organized sporting areas (in this case, tennis courts) as well as open fields for football kicking and disc throwing, well-manicured flower gardens as well as untended wildflowers, sunny knolls for reading and relaxing as well as shady wooded groves for the paler of us, and an abundance of walking paths to hold it all together. Waterlow park is also home to a small cafe and the Lauderdale house, which hosts jazz concerts, plays and art galleries. In other words, it has just enough to bring all members of a community out to enjoy a beautiful English weekend. We saw lots of families with young children (including what looked like a girls youth soccer team and their coaches having a 3-legged race), as well as old friends meeting for a cup of coffee. As I said, it was lovely.

We were there to people-watch and to remember how to throw and catch the disc, but I was immediately charmed by the rather large population of waterfowl. Thank goodness Danny got me the RSPB Guide to British Birds (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds). We were able to come home and identify all the ones I didn't know already.

This is a male tufted duck (note the tuft in the back of the head), apparently the commonest diving duck in Britain. It was, in fact, a very good diver. There were several families of tufted ducks on the various ponds of the park - the largest one had 9 ducklings! But as they were practicing their diving, it was very difficult to get all of them in a photo at once.

We also saw several families of Coots (right), which were the aggressors of the ponds. As confirmed by the bird guide, coots are very territorial, and they were constantly chasing off the other ducks on the pond. The chicks, however, were adorable and noisy.

And just for good measure, here's a picture of a juvenile Moorhen (below), one of Britain's more awkward-looking birds. Don't worry, I'm sure I'll post some pictures of the adults in the future.


Want more pictures of baby birds? Of course you do. Here's one of some mallards we saw in Montreal in June:
The ducklings proceeded to attempt to fly off the bridge, but since their wings were so small they just flapped helplessly and plopped into the pond below. It was quite endearing.

And lest you think we only care about waterfowl, here is probably the cutest thing we saw in the park all day:
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, in London, families play cricket in the park. I'll leave the heavy blogging about cricket to Danny (he's working on a doozy right now!), but let me just say that it is truly adorable to see five year olds have the patience and hand-eye coordination to play the refined, slow-to-progress game of cricket.



So in summary, Waterlow park is a great place to watch birds and people interact with their environment and their peers, a great place for the community to come together. We plan on returning for an outdoor performance of Othello, an evening bat-watching walk, and an afternoon of jazz in the garden. And of course we'll have to see how our little ducklings molt into their adult feathers!

The evening after this trip to the park we hosted our first house guest! David, who is now a world-famous musicologist, joined us at one of our local pubs to watch the world cup final. In the words of the woman shouting in the pub, vamos España!