Birds and Blue Grass!

I was very annoyed yesterday because I had lost some great photographs I have taken about a month ago and edited for a future post.  I spent hours going through thousands of photos on 3 systems - but nothing.  Now could I have deleted them!!  So I went for a walk yesterday evening just over the road into Ward Park and these are the photos I took.  I will start with the birds seen and photographed.

Golden Pheasant

Greylag

This may be a hybrid between Greylag and  Canada Goose

 

This year a lot of young birds have been bred and unfortunately none of them have their names up!!  I have spoken to the man who looks after them but no change!  It is very difficult to photograph these birds because you have to shot through a 1" square wire fence!!

                                                                     Reeves Pheasant

There are plenty of Black headed Gulls both adults and young.

This is the Temminck's Tragopan.  It is distributed in forests of northern South Asia, from northeast India, northwest Vietnam, Tibet and northern provinces of China and Ward Park have a pair.

This is the male whose head is black, forming a mask around the blue facial skin that is extended during courtship; deep orange-red on crest, neck and breast; some males with bright orange collar; rest of body crimson, covered with grey spots on lower breast and black-lined white spots on wing coverts, back and upper tail coverts.   I was not able to get a photo of the female who is a  white-spotted brown bird with blue circular eye skin.  Both birds are very shy.  Its diet consists mainly of berries, grass and plants.

Peacock

We have quite a number of both male and female Peacocks at differing ages.

Song Thrush with young Starling.

There were quite a number of starlings together and at night they come in and roost in a large tree just above where I took this shot.  They must have been having their supper before going to bed!

About a week ago I showed you these Echinops that had not got the blue colour then, now they are covered in bees.  Now which ones?  I think there are 2 different ones here.

Can I say a big thank you to both Roy and Trevor for all the help they gave me in yesterdays' post and all the information and web sites that I can look up to try and learn ID of butterflies and bees.

If I had spent the time trying to work out these bees ID, you would NOT have a post today!

A big snail that had nearly reached the top of a 3' plant!

I love walking through this Rose arch as do many other people.  Children love running through it.

I was VERY surprised to see this moth and even more surprised that I was able to photograph it and then to be able to ID it was a real miracle!!  That was only because in yesterday's post I had photographed one when I had visited the RSBP Reserve in Belfast.  I only know the names of 3 moths as yet and this was one of them!!!

Now to some of the flowers in the park.  Sit back and enjoy these beautiful bedding Dahlias.

Ah!  Some more wonderful bees.  Please feel free to let me know their names if you can.  I will add them to the post.

Then the park had also been planted with beds of Cosmos in a wonderful variety of colours.

Wow!   Another Bee!

Astilbe

Sedum before the colour has appeared

Yarrow

I thought the way the parks division had planted this wonderful scarlet Crocosmia with the brightly coloured Yarrow was brilliant.

This is only a small part of the large crowd that gathered last Sunday to hear 'music in the park'.  During July and August every Sunday between 3.00pm - 5.00pm there is a different band or group and the Council provide deck chairs and picnic tables as a lot of people bring picnics.

“Oh My Darling” band who have prairie roots mixed with bluegrass, Appalachian old time, southern twang, and Franco-folk, making their style a melting pot of musical languages, were expected at the weekly concerts at Ward Park last Sunday, just beside where I live.  Unfortunately they got held up with the security alert at Heathrow Airport.

However, it was not all bad as the Irish are always very resilient and at the very last minute they gathered together 4 very talented musicians and I think they may have called themselves the Ho Bo’s band.  Anyhow they were brilliant and I videoed 2 songs for you to listen to.  It can be accessed at

http://youtu.be/789my1f62YM    If the space below is black, click it!

I hope you enjoyed this post.  I have come to terms with losing my photos!!!

Thanks for visiting and hope you will pop in again soon.

MANY THANKS TO ALL who left comments on any of my post yesterday