Warning. Today’s post has sexual content that may be offensive to some readers.
As you are still reading, all I can do is echo Harold Steptoe’s words to his father, “you dirty old man”. Filming the natural world has become a BBC/Attenborough speciality. In Barons Court our Attenborough is Nathalie Mahieu and she has posted two remarkable videos on her Fulham and Barnes Peregrines website.
At the summit of The Ark is a crows’ nest so it’s appropriate that rooks use it for a parliament when the peregrines aren’t perched up there.
The peregrines have been busy mating. They don’t do it in their nesting box or on the ledge where there are cameras. However, Nathalie caught them at it on the aerial on top of Linacre Court, the tower block on Talgarth Road clearly visible from our garden.
If I had even tried to photograph this scene, let alone make a video, it would have been spot the invisible peregrines.
Now that the sex scene is out of the way here is a shot of Tom and Azina at home.
Not all wildlife photographers have the same motives. Two dogs were filmed chasing deer in Richmond Park. The candid canine snapper followed the owner of the dogs to her car and took a snap of her number plate. He passed this to the police who fined the owner and banned her dogs from Richmond Park. Realistically all dogs should be on leads in London parks that have deer – Richmond had fifty-eight cases of deer being worried in the last year. No, Bertie is not part of that statistic; he (and me too) were cautioned for being off-lead in a skylark nesting meadow. I wasn’t off a lead, I was trying to get Bertie back on his. However, I think it is taking good citizenship too far to report a trivial incident to the police.