New life

The weather was pretty miserable today (rain and cold) so we explored an interesting indoor antique market and, during a break in the rain, a small outdoor art market. Grey and dismal do not make for wonderful pictures.

So rather than share anything from today, here's two things of interest from the last few days I didn't get to.

King's Day made a mess of the city and the canals. The city's street sweepers worked hard yesterday and the city was already amazingly tidy by noon (though there are still big piles of trash that need collecting, but they're working on that, too).

But what about the canals? How are these cleaned (because the Dutch are nothing if not tidy)?. Generally, garbage collects in the canals any day (people chuck stuff in, stuff blows in), but King's day really resulted in a ton of trash floating around.

Enter what I call the "scoop boats".

Trash collectors

We see these guys regularly, almost every day. Some boats are labelled "This boat is made from plastic collected from Amsterdam's canals". It's basically a small boat full of folks (often, mostly kids), armed with not much more than fishing nets, scooping trash.

They are not city workers. I'm kind of interested exactly who they are, and if they do their work with volunteers.

And secondly, in the canals is life. There are swans...

Enjoying King's Day

...and seagulls...

Not unique

...other ducks, and coots. We saw a Eurasian Coot on a nest the other day.

Interesting materials. Maybe they shouldn't clean the canals.

Turns out they were a mating pair.

Having a discussion 

They didn't seem to care about us

And it turns out we caught a nest changeover.

Large feet don't harm the eggs

Quite the clutch 

Settling in

We saw the pair before King's Day; I wonder how well they survived the mayhem and canal mess?