Been swimming a lot - every day! - in the river for the past week or so. The bird life is amazing. On one bank there are wild meadows, on the other ploughed land and a deciduous wood. Apart from the usual ducks and swans - always great to see at 'ground level' when you are in the water - there are a pair of egrets, swallows and a noisy load of blackcaps in the wood. I've also been in the river when a tern has dived in and emerged with a fish. You can actually see the damn fish wriggling as it is carried away, which seems enough to unbalance the tern in flight for a while. Yesterday there were three or four kestrels hovering above one of the banks, but the real show-stoppers, which empty the sky of everything else for a while, are the red kites. I was swimming on my back on Thursday and was able to count 14 at one point. One of them was so close above me that I began to worry for a moment that he thought I was eatable.