Friday 8 June 2018

On a hot day, the male Little Owl near the leaf yard was basking in the sunshine on the top of the chestnut tree.


He preened and had a good scratch.


A young Long-Tailed Tit was also sunbathing, with its tail feathers spread out.


The Feral Pigeons were queuing up to cool down at their favourite bathing place in the Italian Garden fountain.


A Blackbird collected several worms for its nestlings.


A Mistle Thrush was also looking for food to bring to its nest. It found a cherry tomato discarded from someone's salad, pecked at it experimentally and decided that it didn't like tomatoes either.


Tinúviel sent this interesting picture of a House Sparrow--Spanish Sparrow cross seen near Trujillo.


Two teenage Grey Herons confronted each other at the island. I don't know what they were trying to do, and doubt that they did either. (The one on the left is standing on the Great Crested Grebes' nest. Both grebe chicks could be heard at the other end of the island.)


A heron was eating insects from the surface of the Long Water near Peter Pan. It finished by catching a damselfly.


This Common Blue damselfly was sunning itself on the stonework of the Italian Garden.


A Magpie put away a fair number of insects in the little pool at the top of the Dell waterfall.


Two Red-Crested Pochard drakes were fairly hoovering them up.


A Mandarin drake at Peter Pan was almost completely in eclipse. Soon he will look almost like a female. In this inconspicuous state he will be safer when he moults his wing feathers and is temporarily flightless.


Two families of Greylag Geese were begging for food at the east end of the Serpentine. They know very well that parading their goslings will get them plenty of handouts.


Barry Jones sent me this pleasing picture of one of this year's cygnets flapping its tiny wings.


You don't often see a Triceratops in the park.

5 comments:

  1. Thank you for sharing my photo Ralph and a great write up

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  2. Oh my God, look at the tiny little Cygnet flapping its teeny-tiny wings. To think that soon it will grow to have a set of the most powerful wings in the Northern Hemisphere.

    I am tempted to bring a Magpie home. We are currently swimming in droves of stupid drowsy midges. The bird would have fun and get a good meal, and we'd get rid of the nuisance. Win win.

    How I hope Jurassic Park was fact and not fiction... It would be great to see feathered Velociraptores in real life.

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    1. Here you can buy readymade House Martin nests, looking like terracotta flower pots cut in half. Apparently House Martins take to them at once. A much more effective way of getting your midges eaten. There are also 'Swift tiles', roof tiles with a raised bit in the lower edge to allow a Swift to creep in. You have to attract Swifts by putting a loudspeaker on an upper window sill and playing a Swift's nesting call.

      Smart-alecks tell me that the 'Velociraptor' in Jurassic Park is actually based on a Deinonychus. And, of course, like most of creatures in the film, it's Cretaceous.

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  3. Going to amazon.co.uk now to buy one of those...

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