A flash of green. A streak of yellow and blue.

Look up in Cassiobury Park and you might just see something you’re not expecting …

We’ve seen a couple of what we thought were parrots before, in the trees around the Gade Avenue car park. When we finally managed to photograph them we realised they were what appeared to be a parakeet (the green one) and a macaw (the yellow and blue one).

On a later visit to the park we came across a man holding the macaw (below). It wasn’t his, he explained, but belonged to a man who regularly brought it down to Cassiobury for exercise. We didn’t ask him whether the parakeet we’d seen belonged to the same chap or was wild – a possibility given there are loads in the wild in London.

Since taking this, we’ve seen the birds a few more times. Another colourful resident is a woodpecker who we’ve mostly come across halfway up the park between the paddling pools and Café Cha Cha Cha.