Friday 9 June 2017

The Great Crested Grebes nesting on the fallen poplar in the Long Water have their first chick. This picture was taken from across the lake, the only possible viewpoint.


Newly hatched chicks have stripes all over, but the ones on their body are soon covered with grey down, so only their head and neck remain stripy.

The Coots nesting on the platform in the small boathouse lost all their chicks, as always happens when they fall off the platform and can't get back up. Now they have started again, and there will be another doomed brood. This boathouse is inaccessible to the people at Bluebird Boats, who try to be kind to birds, so they can't put in a plank.


A Coot on the Long Water was mildly surprised when a carp swam under it.


The combined broods of Canada Geese were cruising on the Serpentine.


Here is a video of the Greylags' nursery, with two broods. Another Canada family is grazing in the background.


The Mute Swan family on the Long Water came over to Peter Pan to tout for food. A dog passed by on the shore, and the female swan hissed angrily at it.


A pair of Gadwalls were also there. Unlike Mallards, they are not interested in being fed by humans, and tend to keep their distance. The female stood up and had a flap.


The young Grey Heron is almost always in the same place on the edge of the island. It can be seen poking up above the plants, looking foolish as young herons do.


The female Grey Wagtail from the nest in the Dell was hunting on the rafts.


A young Great Tit beside the Long Water was making it very clear that it wanted to be fed.


So was the white-faced Blackbird. Here she is taking sultanas off the railings.



The female Little Owl at the leaf yard looked down serenely from her nest hole.


Paul found a very small bumblebee on the path near Peter Pan, and put it on a bramble flower. After it had recovered from its surprise, it started looking for nectar.


It looked like a Buff-Tailed Bumblebee, the commonest species in the park, but it was only two-thirds of their normal size.

6 comments:

  1. Is that a young Great Tit Ralph? I've been blessed with a family of Great Tits this year, as well as juvenile Blue Tits.

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  2. Yes, it is a Great Tit, thanks. Sorry, careless of me. Now changed.

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  3. If I had to choose a picture to illustrate what family devotion is, I think I'd choose today's first picture of the Great Crested Grebe family. It says so many things without a single word.

    Brave little Bumblebee! Now that is resilience.

    Hissing swans always look (and sound) very scary to me. It's almost as if they were letting their T-Rex ancestry briefly come through.

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    1. A blog on walking round Jurassic Park would be fun, at least for a short time. When the joke wore thin, you could close it with a short note saying that the author has been eaten or stepped on.

      (Mind you, the creatures in the film were Cretaceous, not Jurassic.)

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    2. Except for the Brachiosaurus and Dilophosaurus, and others in the follow-up films. Jim

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    3. How could I forget the Dilophosaurus? What an oversight.

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