Impatient Robin

The female Robin at Mount Gate expected to be given some pine nuts, and was slightly annoyed when I filmed her instead. Of course she got her reward immediately afterwards.

Long-Tailed Tits searched for leaf miner moth caterpillars in the badly damaged leaves of a horse chestnut in the Flower Walk.

Blackcaps are very shy and hard to photograph, so it was pleasing to get a picture of a female at the southwest corner of the bridge ...

... and Ahmet Amerikali found another near the Italian Garden.

He also photographed a Chiffchaff in the trees east of the Lido, evidently a young one as it was begging and fluttering its wings.

The male Little Owl at the Serpentine Gallery was back in his usual lime tree after several days' absence.

The male owlet was in the big plane tree ...

... and three hours later his sister appeared in the same tree.

Both the Peregrines were on the tower, but by the time I got round to it the male had flown off. The female was preening.

This isn't a good video, as I couldn't get near the swan nesting raft at the Lido restaurant and had to stretch awkwardly over the fence. But it does show two young Grey Wagtails and a parent -- the one on the far right. This is the second time the pair has bred this year.

The young Grey Herons in the fifth nest have started climbing around, and two of them could be seen in the branches above the nest.

The heron in the Italian Garden was standing on the edge of the northwest pool. It saw a fish, dived in, and missed it. Here it is crossly swimming back to a place where it could get its feet on the ground.

At least it was leaving the Coots' nest in the southwest pool alone, and the Coots reclaimed it.

They had also been troubled by the local Cormorant, but it too crossed to the pool on the other side.

It's too early to get up hopes, but the Great Crested Grebe on the nest on the island was sitting with his wings raised, and it's possible that he was sheltering a chick.

The pair at the east end of the island were out with their chicks on the water.

The Egyptian Geese at Fisherman's Keep still have their four goslings. The mother is vigilant and the goslings are keeping close to her, which is far from always the case.

A Ruddy Darter dragonfly perched on a yucca leaf in the Dell.

Chaffinches in the Flower Walk

The female Little Owl at the Serpentine Gallery was hiding in the leaves of the big plane tree ...

... where her daughter appeared later.

The male owlet was very visible in a lime. He is much less shy than his sister.

In the Flower Walk the old female Chaffinch ...

... and the young male came out to catch thrown pine nuts in midair.

A Jay in a winged elm near the Italian Garden waited to fly out and grab a peanut.

Ahmet Amerikali saw several Reed Warblers here, in the bed on the east side of the Long Water.

He also found the young Grey Wagtail near the Lido.

The Grey Heron in the Italian Garden was using a duckboard as a fishing station. It yawned.

A brief clip of the feeding frenzy caused by throwing a bit of French bread into the water when there are Black-Headed Gulls around. The gull that gets it has to flee a furious pursuit by its companions.

The Great Crested Grebe chicks at the east end of the Serpentine island took a turn in the water while their parents preened the feathers ruffled by carrying them.

One the other side of the lake the single chick accepted a small fish from its mother.

The Egyptian family went by, still with four goslings.

The Tufted ducklings are already skilled divers.

The single cygnet on the Long Water ate poplar leaves from an overhanging branch.

There are many varieties of salvia in the park and all of them are popular with bees. Buff-Tailed Bumblebees and Common Carders thronged a large patch in the Italian Garden.

In the Rose Garden a Common Carder browsed on a clump of sedum.

I think this fly on a strawflower is Tachina magnicornis, which seems to have no common name.

Three owls

Two visits to the Serpentine Gallery found a good selection of Little Owls: the female in a lime tree ...

... her daughter in another lime ...

... and her son looking down from the top of the big plane tree.

The small birds are getting back to their normal behaviour. A Robin in the Flower Walk came to my hand for the first time in months ...

... and the Great Tits in the Dell have returned to the corkscrew hazel bush where they can usually be found for most of the year.

A Jay followed me down the edge of the Long Water. As it swooped down to grab a peanut from my hand it alarmed a passing runner who thought it was attacking him.

A Carrion Crow dunked a Cheesy Wotsit in the marble fountain in the Italian Garden.

(Yes, that green slimy fountain really is made out of the finest white Carrara marble. When it was cleaned in 2011 it only took a fortnight to return to its pristine filth.)

A new tree for a Wood Pigeon to fall out of, the absurdly named Harlequin Glorybower, Clerodendrum trichotomum. The fruit it was eating is nowhere near ripe. Later it will develop into peculiar red and blue berries.

The male Pied Wagtail often seen around the Dell restaurant caught an insect on the stonework of the fake bridge in the middle of the dam.

The waterfall in the Dell is back in working order after several days when the electric pump was broken, and the foul smelly water in the little stream is beginning to clear.

The top stage of the waterfall is worked by the pump, and is actually slightly above the level of the lake on the other side of the dam. Water flowing out of the lake emerges at the stage below. The pump recirculates all the water in the stream, so it takes some time for the water to be completely changed as it flows into the culvert that takes the buried Westbourne river down to the Thames just upstream from Chelsea Bridge.

The Czech Black-Headed Gull dominates the south shore of the Serpentine from the Lido to the end of the lake, and any gull that comes near gets chased off. The old cast-iron water level provides a perch in the middle of his territory. He made his presence felt by calling loudly.

The Grey Heron in the Italian Garden had seized the Coots' nest in the waterlilies. The Coots and their two chicks were hanging around crossly in the pool, but there was nothing they could do.

A Coot took a few bites of a discarded watermelon at the edge of the Serpentine and went away, but a Moorhen really liked it. It spent a minute and a half eating it until it had had enough.

The Great Crested Grebes at the east end of the island were carrying one chick each. This is not a sustainable arrangement as one parent has to go off fishing, leaving the other to look after the chicks.

The single chick on the other side of the lake gets visibly larger every day, and is squeaking louder and louder.

The 'Polish' swan 4FUJ raised a grey foot among a group at the Triangle. There are several of these pale swans on the Serpentine, among them 4GIQ the Black Swan's mate. It's quite likely that they are all siblings, and also that they are all female, as the 'Polish' mutation is a sex-linked recessive one which makes it quite rare and also almost always seen in females.

The four Egyptian goslings were with their parents at Fisherman's Keep.

A Meadow Brown butterfly near the Serpentine Gallery looked so featureless that I wasn't sure what it was. Usually you can see a bit of dull orange and a dark spot on its front wings even when they are folded, but this one looks plain brown all over.

Lewis and Clark remembered

I've already filmed the Magpie family in the Dell playing silly games in this spot beside the stream. Today two young ones were chasing each other round an Australian tree fern, one of the many subtropical plants in the Dell.

A Carrion Crow on a stump at Temple Gate was planning some awful exploit.

Just up the hill, the male Little Owl was in his usual lime tree.

Long-Tailed Tits often hunt at the northwest corner of the bridge, where there was at least one nest in the spring.

Ahmet Amerikali photographed a Chiffchaff in the scrubby patch east of the Lido.

He also got this dramatic shot of a Black-Headed Gull catching and eating a surprisingly large carp. This is our Czech visitor, ET05.589 / Orange 2V57. He is the dominant gull of the southern shore and east end of the Serpentine, and has taken over the territory of the other dominant gull White 2331, who was found dead in Latvia in May. It seems that the farthest travelled gulls are not only the most dominant but the most predatory.

A young Black-Headed Gull at Peter Pan had probably travelled no farther than the Thames estuary, where there are several breeding ground such as the Pitsea landfill site at Basildon.

Pigeon Eater was on the prowl at the Dell restaurant, head down in his hunting attitude. He didn't get a pigeon while I was there.

A young Lesser Black-Backed Gull on the roof was begging insistently at him, and was very likely his offspring.

A male Pied Wagtail on the edge of the terrace, in search of smaller prey, ran right under my feet.

The Grey Heron from the Italian Garden stepped around the swan nesting island, unused since the Canada Geese nested on it in spring and now overgrown with Great Willowherb.

The Great Crested Grebes at Fisherman's Keep are down to one chick, but this is already quite large, growing fast, and diving energetically. It could swallow the fairly large fish its father broughts, which would have been too much for it a week ago.

The other grebe family, still with two chicks, were in the middle of the lake and too far off for a good picture.

The Egyptian Geese at Fisherman's Keep are holding on to their four goslings, but there's a long way to go.

The Tufted Duck family were by the reeds at the east end of the Lido. The ducklings were diving furiously all over the place, but I managed to count seven and also to get four into the picture.

A Red-Veined Darter dragonfly turned up unexpectedly on the parched grass by the Serpentine Gallery.

A Common Carder bee, faded from ginger to blonde, browsed on French lavender in the Rose Garden.

The insects here showed a marked preference for the herbaceous border beds with mauve and purple flowers, but now they have started spreading into the red and orange beds. A Buff-Tailed Bumblebee visited a Peruvian lily.

A Painted Lady butterfly harmonised with Lewisia flowers. 

I hadn't known what this plant was until an American visitor told me that it was a native of the western United States and named after Meriwether Lewis, commander of the expedition that penetrated to the west coast between 1804 and 1806. His companion William Clark is also commemorated in the Clarkia flower, a better known species although I had no idea that it was called after the explorer.