The Great Crested Grebes nesting on the poplar on the Long Water have three chicks. I only saw two eggs when I was looking at the nest on the 30th; one of them must have been covered with weed. This is the only picture I have that shows all three chicks -- a pity a Tufted Duck was passing behind the parent's head at the time.

Sadly, the Coots nesting in the Italian Garden have lost all their newly hatched chicks. The parents were swimming disconsolately around their empty nest. This was their second attempt, and I don't think they will try again. Impossible to know what raided the nest: it could have been a Black-Headed Gull or Herring Gull, but the position of the nest on a box of soil for the water plants means that a Grey Heron could have flown in and stood there. It was a silly place for a nest -- though not as silly as the grebes' nest on the poplar.

At the Serpentine island, both sets of grebes were having a territorial dispute. The two younger chicks were still riding on their parent's back, but that does not inhibit a dispute and in fact encourages it, as the parents feel they have something important to defend.

I saw a Greylag Goose walking about with two large, legible rings, one of them a plastic one with big lettering. Most of these plastic rings are blue, but this one was white, so I thought it might be interesting. Annoyingly, it turned out to be a local ring from the Natural History Museum, but here are the pictures anyway, as the information may be of some use to someone.

There was a big flock of Long-Tailed Tits at the Vista, looking very pretty in the mild sunshine.