Last Saturday we picked C's niece up from the Luas terminus ( light rail network) and went for a walk in Phoenix Park before lunch. First thing we saw after parking was a group of people with large nets, and when I looked back, it was four years ago less one day that I had also seen a similar sight, and it was people looking for the young fawns to tag them.
Mallard with chicks on the bank of one of the ponds, hen tufted duck with chicks on the Quarry pond (they're hard to see, but if you zoom in you'll see the chicks are still so small that one of them is standing on a lily pad)... When C's brother and all the family were over here 20 years ago we also went for a walk in the park, and when the girls first saw the deer, they were so excited that they were finding it difficult to hold their cameras steady to take photos. So it was nice to see a large herd of deer again this time.
We've been having something of a heatwave here - not as extreme as the UK and mainland Europe, but still hot by Irish standards. Last night we went for a walk along the canal in the evening.
The foreground in the heron shot is one of the houseboats moored along the bank. There were two adult swans and four cygnets down at the 12th Lock. And walking back I spotted a hen blackbird gathering berries to bring back to the nest.
