Birds of Windermere 2025 - Present
Every day after work, while waiting for the 599, I walk down to a spot between the bus stop and the amusement arcades on the shoreline of Windermere. I watch the birds and the tourists, and the strange interactions between the two. Birds on arms, hands, legs. Geese always pecking at other geese. Children nearly losing little fingers to big bird mouths. Birds looking for food and being fed — being overfed.
I watch the mad dash of a menagerie of species when one birds notices another human being with more bird feed: they waddle, rush, and fly toward a new target.
Both subjects look curiously at me and my camera. At the tourists, I always smile; at the birds especially the larger ones I grimace.
They look at me as if I might have something to give, but in fact I am only there to take. I can see their small bird brains whirring. They are so used to food from people that they don’t know what to make of me waving a camera in their faces. I’m not the only one recording this. Friends, families and sometimes the subjects of my pictures are photographing and videoing themselves, for posterity or for social media, I guess. This small patch of lakeshore by England’s largest lake, picturesque next to the amusement arcades? Not so much. I know how Wordsworth felt about the railways; I imagine he would have hated it here.