New Year's Day walk (3/3)

 Not all of the walk was about urban monuments or urban art. One of the delights of river walks is the edge between the built landscape and the wild. There were quite a few mallards swimming upstream.

 Between the path and the river, scrubby banks with wildflowers.

 One of my favorite flowers in the area (una malva).

 Parrots are an invasive species here, but the are just as charming as the ones in San Francisco.

 I saw quite a few cormorants--Great Cormorant (Phalacrocorax carbo)--flying and swimming. This one dove several times, and always emerged upstream.

Looking back from the Stone Bridge, you can see the kind of vegetation on the banks. 

An encounter that included vigorous sniffing.