The reserve of Roodklooster/Rouge-Cloître, my 'local' patch in the south-east of Brussels, has once again turned into one big nursery.
There were baby tits everywhere when I visited yesterday, including some ever so cute Long-tailed Tits. A week-old troupe of Egyptian goslings weren't far behind in the cute stakes, and this mother Mute Swan was doing her best to give her six cygnets a healthy diet by pulling up beakfuls of algae and even jumping out of the water to strip leaves off overhanging branches. This particular pair of swans seem to have six chicks every year and two of them are always pure white instead of the more typical grey. A pair of Grey Herons, however, have bred for the first time and their conspicuous nest in the crown of a tree on an island now contains two very large, shaggy chicks. The Coots, on the other hand, seem to be settling in for second broods as I saw several of them sitting on nests. Hiding away in the grasses from all these hungry beaks to be fed, was this White-legged Damselfly, a very discrete species I rarely get to see, let alone photograph.
