Ice-breaking Mute Swan

The ponds and lakes in town are all covered on ice after the last frosts. The other day I watched as part of a family of swans landed on ice on their lake, the young walking tentatively on the slippery ice. Today a pair of swans reached the edge of the ice and the cob seemed determined to move on. It pushed its chest onto the ice and broke it, moving forward each time. I noticed how after each break, it did a tail shake, as they often do after landing. I wonder if the swan feels like it is in unchartered territory and is nervous while breaking the ice. Tail shaking is something waterfowl do after an exciting event (mating, landing). The cob fed under where the ice had been, but then it decided to turn round to its partner.

Cob mute swan ice breaking.

Often lakes that have swans have some open water, as the large, heavy swans are able to break the ice. If they can't and the lake becomes fully iced over, then all waterfowl leaves in search of some open water. 

These are some photos of a mute swan family in a different lake.

Initially one of the young was on its own.

Its family had landed on the other side of the lake, on the ice, and it flew towards them.

The young was then keen to return to the open water.

The pen was happy to stop to preen and rest on the ice.

Crows on ice

After days of heavy rains, it has been quite cold the last few days, and the large puddles everywhere have frozen over. A group of a dozen Carrion Crows had gathered this afternoon on the grass of my local park, probably before flying to their roost. This pair of Carrion Crows, undeterred by the cold, was actually foraging on an iced up puddle. One of the individuals even dared to walk on the ice, not bothered by slipping on it occasionally, an experience that is probably quite unusual, as they do not normally wade. This individual must have overcome a natural inhibition to walk on water. But not only that, both exploited this ability to look through the ice in search of food tidbits which normally would be out of reach, far from the puddle edge. The crows used their beak as a hammer to break through the ice and reach underneath, or to lift pieces of it. The less adventurous individual did this from the safety of the shore, but the other one walked about checking the whole surface of the puddle. Many ground-living invertebrates, such as earthworms, might have drown in the flooded ground after surfacing in search of air, and the ice itself provided the crow with a platform from which to obtain these otherwise unreachable resources.
 Another illustration of the wonderful opportunistic behaviour of crows.
 The following video has a short clip of the pair of Crows on ice. There is another one in my YouTube channel.