 
Geese are probably the most prolific of the waterfowl in the Jephson Gardens. Swimming, pottering beside the lake in pairs - they mate for life -
 
or sleeping under the trees, and opening an eye occasionally to watch the humans watching them, they are all around and on the river and the lakes.
 
Ducks are very popular with visitors, who bring their children to feed them. You can see the bread floating around in the water.
 
There is something of an imbalance in the duck population, in that there are far more drakes than ducks. Even on land they will come very close to visitors in search of food.
 
A large colony of squirrels lives in the Jephson Gardens. It is virtually impossible to visit the gardens without seeing at least one.
 
Like the waterfowl they are very tame because visitors feed them. The baby squirrel in these two pictures ran over me and sat down by my feet, obviously expecting me to give him something. Since I did not have squirrel food with me, he gave up and went off to hunt for buried acorns in the flower bed.
 
My favourites are a pair of swans that live in the gardens and nest on this island in the river. In the photo above right they were just swapping over nest minding duties. The one who had been brooding the eggs stretched as it was allowed to stand up again, while its mate settled in on the eggs.
 
Then the off duty swan went off for a swim and fly around, while its mate began to doze over its work.
There are full size copies of the photographs on these pages, plus many more photos of the gardens, in my photograph gallery. If you wish to go straight to the page of thumbnails where the gardens photographs start, click here. The forward arrows will take you to many more pages of photographs of the Jephson Gardens. There are two batches of garden photograps, with a page of sheep between them.
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