Monday 31 July 2017

A Long-Tailed Tit pulled a larva off a twig and ate it ...


... leaving a sticky green thread which the larva had trailed round the twig.


The young Starlings are growing their iridescent adult feathers.


There are two young Robins in the Rose Garden. They too are beginning to get their adult colour.


The female Little Owl near the leaf yard was enjoying the sunshine.


The Great Crested Grebes nesting in the fallen poplar on the Long Water have lost their one chick, and are starting again. It would be their third brood. They haven't been successful, but there's still plenty of time.


I could only see two chicks of the other family on the Long Water. They are now quite large, but still rushing around around demanding food. This video was taken looking down from the Serpentine bridge, with inevitable traffic noise in background.


One of the parents has been on their nest -- too far away for an adequate picture -- for several days. They may also be thinking of another brood. Their chicks are about the same age as the teenage grebe on the Serpentine was when it was abandoned, and survived. (I haven't seen it for a couple of days, but it tends to stay in cover on the edge of the island.)

A Mute Swan was washing furiously on the Long Water, with the light behind it.


The Black Swan was near the Lido, dozing on one leg.


This goose on the Serpentine is so large that it has to be a Canada--Greylag hybrid, but it's oddly pale. If it were not for its size I would have taken it for a Greylag--Bar-Headed cross.


A juvenile gull, probably a Lesser Black-Back, balanced uncertainly on one of the mooring buoys on the Serpentine. Young gulls love pulling rope ends.


A Greenbottle fly wandered over a marigold behind the Lido.


There was also a bee-mimicking hoverfly. I wouldn't like to guess its species -- there are about 6o00.


Here is a real honeybee for comparison.

9 comments:

  1. The Black Swan is the picture of elegance, even in his sleep.

    I always thought of Mute Swans as very graceful and elegant(I mostly saw them in pictures and films when I was little, I had very little experience of them in real life). But they really aren't, are they? It's not that they are stumpy or clunky, it's that they are hulking by virtue of their size. They are (un)gentle giants. Funnily enough, the heaviest flying bird in existence, the Great Bustard, is quite graceful and even dainty in its gait and general deportment.

    Poor baby Grebe. The picture of the lovely young Robin takes the teeth out of the sadness, though.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Ps: The Long-tailed Tit reminds me of the adorably terrifying bird in A Bug's Life.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Seeing Mute Swans close up, with their waddling gait, tremendous efforts to get into the air, and grave problems with manoeuvrability once airborne, makes you realise that they are near the size limit for a flying animal. Great Bustards may be graceful on the ground, but I have never seen one fly. No one has much idea about how the giant pterosaurs flew, and probably they could only take off by jumping off cliffs. Even now we have birds that can't easily take off from a level surface: albatrosses and swifts.

      Delete
    2. One problem for swans is needing proportionately more gut for their mainly plant diet. Pterosaurs and also Pelagornis weren't held back by this. Jim

      Delete
    3. Have often wondered about the digestive systems of the Anseriformes, who seem to get plenty of nourishment out of low-energy foods without having an onboard distillery like a cow.

      Delete
  3. They are easy to see flying here (not so long ago a handful of female birds flew parallel to the highway almost directly side by side with my car). They are slow and hesitant to get airborn, but once in the air they are very powerful and quite swift for their size (there are no good clips at youtube to link to - if I should find a good one, I'll post the link). Monk and Griffon vultures, which are also quite heavy, are marvels at taking off from the ground: they take a couple of leaps and get airborn almost vertically. I think that perhaps Mute Swans may be limited by their webbed feet.

    There were very heavy flying eagles in the past like Haast's Eagles, which were apparently good flyers. Perhaps they were like the Antonov-225: something that ought not to fly, but does.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks. The females are much smaller than the males, aren't they? We've only got a handful of Great Bustards here, reintroduced on Salisbury Plain not very successfully and they have to keep getting more.

      Delete
    2. Yes they are, as much as by a third at times. I've seen very large males clearing quite steepy hills though.

      These two clips are nothing to write home again, but they show the flight mechanics. The first one shows a mixed band taking flight (it is right at the very beginning of the clip; if you blink, you'll miss it):

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMQ_OimPSkA

      Mute the sound! The background music is quite irritating.

      The second one is a short clip of an adult male in flight:

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAgkL1wE4QI

      Wasn't your own father involved in re-introducing the Great Bustard in Salisbury Plain? I think I am not alone in my wish to be told more about your father's efforts.

      Delete
    3. Thanks for the clips. They look heavy but powerful. I note the projecting chest necessary to support the massive flight muscles necessary to keep these enormous birds going.

      It was my father's friend Aylmer Tryon who did the first reintroduction of Great Bustards to Salisbury Plain, a thinly populated upland thought to be the most suitable place for them. I think we're on the third reintroduction after the first two petered out. Let's hope they reach critical mass eventually.

      Delete