Bird watching, England style

I made a comment yesterday about not seeing many birds here. There are trees and shrubs everywhere but not many birds. Then I began looking in earnest for the birds that I imagined must be living here and so, I began seeing them.

There is a bird in our backyard that looks like a hybrid of a crow and a pigeon. The head is dark black, shiny with a crow's eyes and beak. The body then changes to white with a plump breast and short legs followed by a smear of blue feathers ending finally with a black tail. This conglomerated bird stalked around the yard all morning eating something out of the grass.

The second bird I noticed looked like a dove on steroids. It's just a bit smaller than a seagull. This bird is the soft gray of a west Texas mourning dove with a white band around it's throat and maybe, maybe I saw a bit of darker gray on the wings or the tail. It's flight is not anything like a dove. It coasts quite a bit, unlike doves and pigeons which seem to flap their wings almost constantly in flight.

I'll watch more carefully today to see if I can find any other interesting birds.