Friday 8 June 2012
A windy day. The Reed Warbler was singing his clattering song again, sitting well down in the same patch of reeds on the Long Water near the bridge. As the stems lashed about about in the gusts, he was intermittently visible and I tried to photograph him by pointing the camera at where he was and clicking away randomly. The result is not good, but I feel very lucky to have got a picture at all.
Under the parapet of the the Italian Garden, a pair of Great Crested Grebes were trying their luck fishing in the dense algae. You could see from a moving disturbance on the surface where they were rummaging, and occasionally one would emerge draped in slime.
Plenty of Swifts and House Martins. Just by the embassies where the martins nest, there was another Blue Tit nesting in a lamp post -- there are now at least three nests in these old gas lamps. Here a parent returns with a beak full of small green caterpillars to feed the nestlings.
A Coots' nest in the netting to the east of the Lido has produced three young. The grassland is covered with families of Wood Pigeons, birds that are getting commoner in the park every year. And two pairs of Gadwalls seem to have taken up permanent residence, instead of flying in occasionally from the Buckingham Palace garden as they have usually done in the past.
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I love the Blue Tits' choice of the old lamps as nesting places: old meets VERY new.
ReplyDeleteBut the photo of the Reed Warbler is a real achievement. Well done. I haven't even managed to get near enough to hear it yet. Where exactly are the reed beds in relation to the bridge? I can't work out which ones they are in relation to where you could stand to get an angle for a picture.
The Reed Warbler was in the patch of reeds at the southwest corner of the bridge, where the path has been widened to make a semicircular viewing area. There is a notice here giving some pretty inaccurate information about the reed bed (Water Rails? Wood Mice??), but it does include a far better picture of a Reed Warbler taken by Tony Duckett, probably in Regent's Park where these birds can also be found.
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