In between watching Wimbledon and doing work I keep an eye on the bird traffic outside and the behaviour of a young magpie who appeared out of the blue yesterday and since then has seem to taken a liking to our garden, convinced me to stop what I was doing and to write down what I was seeing.
We had many regular visits from the mother magpie for a while now and the mother seemed in a bad rather state, feather moulding, wings and tails not in top form, signs of a dedicated mother. But since yesterday a young magpie appeared on the top of one of our garden walls, squawking and demanding to be fed while his/her poor mother was carrying food to him and was trying at the same time to keep all the other big birds away (mainly the pesky jackdaws). The young magpie is quite big and at first sight it looks like an adult one and only in comparison to his mother you can see the difference.
But today he has become braver and decided to come along to where his mum is getting the food from, mostly our feeding wall, where he also discovered one of the water bowls which we keep full of water for the birds. Today of course is not a typical summer day and although is not pouring with rain yet it is pretty cold for this time of the year. But this silly young bird decided that he needed a dip in the bowl and first he started by dipping his feet, then his bottom and finally he dipped in completely emerging soaking wet, so wet that he actually scared away the jackdaws that they were eating near by at the time. I wish I could understand his reasons for doing so or that I had my camera at hand...if he wanted to get wet he could have easily just waited for the rain to start. What was the point of this cold shower this morning? Well I guess the fact that he is still quite young and inexperienced might explain it...Still the day is young and he might come back for another dip.