Attenborough Nature Reserve

I’ve spent Christmas with family in Derby this year. On Christmas morning we had a walk round the Attenborough Nature Reserve, between Derby and Nottingham. Its 360 acres of flooded former gravel pits and islands are now an important site for a huge variety of wildfowl. Over 250 bird species have been seen there. We saw the most common ones - lots of mallard and tufted ducks, cormorants drying themselves with wings outstretched, lapwings and black headed gulls together on a mud bank, great crested grebes in surprising numbers, coots, moorhens, mute swans and some ornamentals such as Egyptian geese.

Robin on Christmas day

Tufted duck
 
Great crested grebes pairing up already
 
Gulls, swans and a cormorant

Brown rat on the path (they get a bad press)

Two-year-old Theo not only completes the jigsaw, but then names
all the dinosaurs; Diplodocus, Stegosaurus, Triceratops…
 

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