We didn’t have any firm plans on the drive up but we were on the lookout for anything of interest just to give us a chance to stretch our legs and as we were heading along the A40 in the vicinity of Bourton-on-the-Water we spotted a sign for Birdland. This was where we took a break.

This post will feature some photographs of some of the birds we saw. As I’m not a birder or twitcher or ornithologist or even vaguely knowledgeable about birds in general there’s not going to be anything remotely interesting to mention about them, and I won’t even guess at some of the species. Do we like seeing birds when we travel? Yes. Do we notice birds we’ve not seen before? Yes. Do we have a clue what they are other than birds? Absolutely not. Is this waffle just to pad out the text content of this post so it’s not just entirely a set of pictures of birds all labelled as “Bird”? Maybe.

You’ll notice a lot of photos of penguins here. The main reason for this is that my wife really likes penguins. They are interesting, it’s true, but they do pong a bit to my sensitive nose. Birdland has England’s only King Penguins. They’re very similar to Emperor Penguins but are constrained to ruling over a single land by Antarctic decree.

To finish, a couple of photographs I was very pleased with, getting enough sharpness on the eyes and a shallow enough depth of field for bokeh plus some interesting texture effects caused by shooting through a wire mesh. A parrot – which you could probably tell even if you had the same bird knowledge levels as me on account of its general parrotness – and, below that, a black-throated laughingthrush. Yes, I did have to point my phone at the picture and get it to identify the bird. Yes, I could have done that with all the birds. But so could you.