These last couple of weeks have been a lot of sitting and waiting. First of all the weather has been unseasonably cold, too cold to start much planting out into the garden. I have a friend from Siberia, and we were comparing weather forecasts. It’s clear Amsterdam is even colder now than Siberia.
The other way I’ve been sitting and waiting is the trash collectors and street cleaners have been on strike for much of the last few weeks. The strike was settled over this past weekend. I don’t know any details of the settlement, but apparently the main issues at stake were a raise and respect. I’m not quite sure what they were expecting in terms of respect, but I guess they finally got that from the city. I understand the wage difference was not all that serious.
The strike has really been annoying, and large piles of rotting trash have been collecting all over the city. We were not supposed to put out trash out, so most people’s houses were also filling up with trash. Even now, they don’t seem in much of a hurry to collect it, and it’s only slowly getting cleaned up.
Here’s some local wildlife checking out this pile. Anyone know what kind of bird that is?
Here’s a pile decorated by a graffiti artist.
One thing’s for sure. I won’t be missing the smell of rotting garbage…
Grey heron – Ardea cinerea – I’ve never seen one scavenging instead of fishing. Maybe it’s going through a box of herrings?
Rhizowen is correct – it may fancy its chances of grabbing a rat although I have seen them scavenge.
Interesting to see one scavenging. I’ve only seen them fishing or hunting through marshy fields.
I’ve very occasionally seen grey herons hanging about in my neighbour’s pond, and thought it was strange to see them in a suburban garden. But I’ve certainly never seen one foraging in a city street.
They’re not uncommon here. They live along the canals in Amsterdam, but like everyone’s pointed out already, they usually eat fish so you don’t run into them in the streets often. Steph just reminded me of the Dutch word ‘reiger’, but as I was writing this I realized I didn’t know the English word.
This one was acting very funny, just slowly wandering around the pile of garbage. It was a little concerned about me standing there with my camera, but it wasn’t bothered at all by the people walking past.
I understand these can live as long as 30 years, and it’s can apparently be a problem if one decides to make home above your car, because once it’s there you will never get it to stop pooping on your car.
OMG Patrick this photo is so… Greek! lol
We had the same problem with rubbish last week. Here the problem is from the scrap heaps usually.
The bird is Grey heron – Ardea cinerea, Rhizowen is correct. Usually you can find them near lakes or streams.
What else? cold…. well we had a warm weather from April but the last 3-4 days we have cold also, It’s like autumn
(P.S. I change url/username/email etc)
Hi Mary,
The new blog looks great! I’ve updated the links.