30 Days Wild day 20- Clumber park

The 20th was my mum's birthday, so first thing in the morning I got on the train and went to meet my parents in Newark. After spending some time at a gallery, we stopped at Clumber Park for a walk in the early evening.

I've loved Clumber Park since I was little. It's a National Trust property, somewhere we used to go for days out, with picnics and ball games. The house was demolished in 1938 so what remains is a beautiful patchwork of parkland, woodland and heathland. There's also a lake, which one memorable weekend we ended up walking all the way around after getting lost on my bronze D of E expedition.

We didn't walk all the way around the lake on this visit, but we did walk up to it. It was full of bird life, with swans, coot and moorhen, as well as large flocks of greylag and canada geese. The goslings were mostly full grown, like in York, but there was a family of swans which were absolutely captivating.

I'd never really considered how swans feed their cygnets before, assuming that, like ducklings, they forage relatively independently. However, that proved not to be the case. The adult swans were using their long necks to reach down to the water plants growing from the bottom of the lake, then lifting them up to the surface for the cygnets to eat. It was fascinating to watch.