Downbeat

As I walk over the bridge, a heron flies down to the silty bar below the weir. It's a grey-headed bird (a first winter juvenile) and when it lands it looks ill at ease: perhaps it's wary of me, up on the bridge. At that moment there's a bubbling in the water a few yards away, as if a crocodile or a leopard seal is about to surface.

Spooked, the heron flies off upstream while, from the bubbles, a pair of mallards emerge, shaking the water from themselves before swimming off together.

By now the heron has reached the calmer, deeper water beyond the weir and it flies along lugubriously, the tips of its bowed wings almost touching the surface on the downbeat.