This excellent picture and the next one were taken by Tom yesterday.
The Little Owls at the leaf yard were side by side in their hole.
The male owl here was feeling skittish, and all I could see today was the back of him disappearing into the hole whenever I went near the tree.
But the female owl near the Albert Memorial was calmly dozing in the spring sunshine.
Under her tree, a Jackdaw was gathering moss to make a nest lining.
At the leaf yard a Great Tit ate a pine nut ...
... and a Starling sang.
The Mute Swans on the Long Water were at their nest, to the disgust of a pair of Coots whose half completed nest can be seen at the far left of the picture.
Thankfully, the Egyptian Geese who have quickly lost every brood didn't seem to be thinking of nesting again. They were in the Italian Garden, and the female was preening her wings. They are paler than the normal Egyptian dark brown, but not as pale as Blondie's.
A Mandarin drake at Peter Pan was looking his best in the sunshine.
A young Cormorant stared at the camera with its beautiful green eyes.
There were also stares from a Pied Wagtail ...
... a Black-Headed Gull ...
... and a Moorhen.
Moorhens delight in knocking these small gulls off their posts.
A life on the ocean wave. The boat which the park management has provided for the gardeners is not a masterpiece of marine engineering. It has two oars but only one rowlock, and it leaks.
Great collection of bird stares! From the impudence of the Gull to the nonchalance of the Moorhen.
ReplyDeleteMoorhens pulling gulls' legs is a beloved classic of this blog, I think.
What piece of decoration is the disgruntled Coot carrying away? It looks like some plastic box.
(currently battling the linux Grey Screen of Death)
The Coot isn't carrying anything. It's behind one of the circle of wooden posts that were driven into the lake bed to make the island. They were lashed together with willow twigs woven in and out to create a kind of basket, which was then filled with brushwood to above water level and covered with live reed plants. The idea was that the roots of the reeds would bind the structure together. But the designer didn't allow for the destructive power of swans, which ripped the reeds up, and now half the island has sunk below water level and it is beginning to disintegrate.
ReplyDeleteSorry that the Linux installer has jammed. I suspect that version 17.1 may be too much for the elderly machine to cope with, and it has simply run out of processing power as the installation proceeded.