Boris, Matilda, and Family (and all their neighbours)

We live overlooking the Oxford Canal... Glamorous I hear you think, well think again. What we actually overlook is a stormwater drain, which happens to connect to the downstream end of the Oxford Canal a couple of bridges upstream to the Thames, acouple of bridges down stream. The flow in this channel is controlled by a couple of radial sluice gates (lots of fun for a hydraulic engineer like myself!) Currently we have low flow conditions which is ideal for seeing all the bikes, road cones, stolen DVD players and a whole load of other great things. The other thing it is ideal for is ducks!

Now Peter and I affectionately named a rather loud duck that came up the channel and woke us up every morning as Boris. A few weeks ago Boris and their lady friends came cruising up the channel looking for their usual breeding spot which was about 1m under water as at that stage we were in high flow conditions (hard work for ducks!) So off they went, and off I went, to Oz.

When I returned, Peter and I noticed that our lovely neighbour, Boris had found himself a lovely lady named Matilda (or so we believe she is called) and low and behold they had had four cute as babies. We took to feeding them a little bit of bread on our way out for a run and spent a bit of time watching these cute little things swimming after mum. However Boris had also got some new neighbours, The Three Musketeers. These fellas are a little bigger and a lot more bossy then Boris, and like to let him know this. In the course of about 10mins, poor old Boris was chased off down the river by the Three Musketeers about three times.

Now for the sad part, the following day we went to see how our lovely ducks were doing with their four babies, and there was only one baby left! We have no clue where the others went to

:-(

The following day, there was just Boris and Matilda. Surely ducks don't grow up that quick!

Also on our channel watching duty, we noticed a lot of fish, big ones too. We think they may be Salmon or Trout.

So all in all our stormwater channel provides a great wildlife watching post. I'll keep you updated if Boris and Matilda have any more in round two...