A young Mute Swan was in the central pool of the Italian Garden yesterday. This pool has higher sides than the others, and I thought the swan might be stuck in it. But swans are reasonably good at scrambling up banks, so I thought I would leave it alone and see if it could get out. There were plenty of algae in the pool to eat.

Today it was still there, and so it was clearly stuck. It had also eaten most of the algae. So I unchained one of the duckboards that help birds to get in and out of the four larger pools, and dragged it over and put it into the central pool with its lower end resting on the drain to stop it from sliding in. The swan immediately got on to the bottom of the board, and I thought it would be glad to climb out. But instead it sat down and started eating the algae off the board.

Well, you can't expect swans to behave in the way you want. So I left it to its own devices, and hope it will have the good sense to get out this evening when the park is closed.

There are now twelve cygnets: four on the Long Water, and broods of four, three and one on the Serpentine.

Several broods of young Starlings are now fledged and chasing their parents around. This one, at the Lido restaurant, had already learnt to fly around the tables scavenging food, though it was also begging from its parents.

And the four new Egyptian Geese, which I had missed yesterday, were swimming briskly after their mother.

Egyptian Geese don't have the defensive strategy of 'proper' geese, which is to keep their goslings between the parents, and so protected from gulls.

This Pied Wagtail was flying away from the Round Pond, where it had been harvesting a beakful of insects from the mats of green algae in the water. Evidently it has a nest nearby, perhaps in a crevice in a wall at Kensington Palace.