Birds and butterflies

We walked along the river to Piddinghoe this morning and I was hoping to see the grey heron that has been teasing me a few times in the past (when I haven't had my long lens with me!). But there was no sign of the heron, so I took some photos of butterflies along the river bank.



My first ever shot of a small tortoiseshell. You don't see them very often around here.



Swans with cygnets... (is that the second batch of the summer? or third?)



Anyway, as we got nearer to the Piddinghoe sailing lake and I saw that there were loads of geese swimming on it, I admit to some shocking behaviour: I thought I'd run towards the lake and make all the geese set off in a frightened flight and I'll get a brilliant picture of dozens of geese taking off from the lake surface. I know - not very nice to disturb the geese's peaceful morning like that. But Zebedee was playing with me and he headed for the lake, too. As I got very close to the edge of the lake, Zebedee was already there by the reeds and long grasses and had just scared some other bird away. Some really big bird. About the size of a grey heron, in fact.



Damn! I missed it! How clever of me to try and scare away the geese and ending up scaring away the one bird that I didn't want to scare, if it happened to be anyway nearby. And the geese were still exactly where they were before - didn't bat an eyelid at our incredibly scary dash towards the lake. (They probably don't even have eyelids, mind you.)



Not even when a swan flew over them.






In the meantime, the grey heron was on the other side of the lake, not in a very photogenic environment.





One of these days I'm going to get a proper photo of it.