Tuesday 12 July 2016

The male Little Owl from the oak tree looked down from a high branch.


Twenty minutes later it was raining hard, but the male Little Owl in the chestnut tree was sitting out in it.


Later, both owlets came out in the same tree.



This is the family of Greylag Geese with nine goslings. When I looked at them a couple of days ago they had eight, and I thought sadly that one of them had died. But today there were ten. It seems that goslings wander off into other broods. Indeed, this family started off with seven, and were seen with that number on several successive days before two more turned up from somewhere.


The Black Swan was having a face-off with the aggressive Mute Swan, though they didn't get close enough to make an interesting picture. As soon as he saw me he made a wide circle around his opponent and came ashore for a digestive biscuit.


The last Mallard duckling is still hanging on. It was at the Vista, flapping its little wings while its mother ignored it and sat on a post preening herself.


There are two families of Moorhens in the Italian Garden ponds, one with four or maybe five chicks, the other with four smaller ones. This one was pulling up algae, apparently not to eat it but to see if there was some little edible creature underneath.


In the next pond, a Grey Heron was looking ornamental in a patch of purple loosestrife.


Visitors to the park, seeing the herons standing perfectly still, sometimes think they really are ornaments made of plastic.

There were ten Lesser Black-Backed Gulls on the posts at Peter Pan, and no Herring Gulls.


All the Herring Gulls were on the Serpentine. The two species are increasingly settling into their own territories. However, there is one pair of Lesser Black-Backs on the Serpentine, the famous pigeon killer and his mate. Here he is trying a new technique, ambushing pigeons from behind a bench. He nearly got one while we were there.


Virginia sent me this pleasing picture of two Rose-Ringed Parakeets amicably sharing a leaf.

6 comments:

  1. How could any mallard mum refuse that duckling?!

    Did you see this Ralph?

    http://www.timeout.com/london/things-to-do/wild-london-photography-competition

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    1. Thanks. I fear I'm not in the class of the entries they will get, judging from the pictures on the page. And where on earth do you do white-water rafting in London?

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  2. Only white-water rafting I know of is near Waltham Cross, Lea Valley. (I think to do with the Olympics)
    Anyway, your photos are always good to look at, and often excellent- in a different league from flashy. I'm not trying to flatter either.
    Today I particularly enjoyed the slightly soggy-underneath moorhen chick.

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  3. (or do I mean 'neither'. The split infinitive the other day was on purpose.)

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    1. Thank you for your kind words. I think you mean 'either'. One should split infinitives as often as possible, to annoy pedants.

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  4. Ah, but it is a misplaced pedantry: just because the Latin infinitive is a single word doesn't mean the English paired-words need to be treated analogously as indivisible. English grammar is, if analysed structurally, *entirely unlike Latin (unsurprisingly!).

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