Friday 17 February 2017

The Great Crested Grebes at the island are now nesting seriously.  They chased another grebe away and it fled down the lake at high speed.


Then they had a display in front of the electric boat moored at the island.


The nest is in the bushes behind the boat, and hard to photograph through the twigs.


The intruding grebe was unruffled by its defeat, but felt like having a rest.


Yesterday I heard a Little Grebe calling, a sign that there is more than one on the lake. And today I saw them both, a long way off on the Long Water near the bridge.


It's very hard to tell how many of these secretive little birds there are. This is the first time I've seen more than  one on the lake in more than a year.

Several Treecreepers could be heard in Kensington Gardens. This one was near Queen's Gate.


There were two Nuthatches in the next tree, a male singing right at the top and his mate preening lower down.


A Long-Tailed Tit examined a gall on a twig to see if there were any insects. The gall is formed by insects laying eggs in the twig, but the larvae would have been safe inside the woody lump.


A Blue Tit at the leaf yard was having an easier time finding food, and collected a piece of peanut.


A Robin was also expecting a handout.


The Little Owl was in the lime tree near the Henry Moore sculpture.


The one near the Albert Memorial came out in the afternoon.


Tom saw a Sparrowhawk near Peter Pan, and also several Mandarins. But he's still on his way home, so I'll put up his pictures later. Meanwhile, here are a pair of Gadwalls in the same place.

2 comments:

  1. Stunning long-tailed tit picture. How did you manage to capture that?

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  2. They're not all that hard. They're not shy like, say, Wrens. You take 50 pictures and throw away 49 of them.

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