The scruffy Blue Tit we know as Patch was feeding his or her offspring in the leaf yard. Here they are together. Patch collected an inordinate quantity of pine nuts from me, which went straight into the ravenous young bird.

The Blue Tits in the lamp post behind the Lido are still feeding their brood in their oddly sited nest.

At the outflow of the Serpentine, the eggs in the Coots' nest are hatching. There were three chicks and at least one unhatched egg -- the mother stayed on the nest, so I couldn't see more, except that the nest also contained a blue plastic bottle cap and a tennis ball. In this picture, one of the chicks is out of sight under its mother's wing.

Immediately after I took this picture, the chick on the right lost its footing, fell into the water and was swept over the weir into the pool below. It should have been able to get up again, since the piece of wood you can see is the top of a wooden ramp leading up from the pool, which was put in by Malcolm the wildlife officer last year. Before this the Coots, which persisted in nesting in this silly place, lost all their chicks one by one as they were washed away and unable to climb back. A family of Moorhens actually inside the pool did well, however, as Moorhens can climb almost anything, including a weir.

Speaking of climbing out, the Mute Swan in the central pool of the Italian Garden is still there, in spite of having a duckboard that allows it to climb out of this very narrow place. This morning the gardeners had move the duckboard to a better place in the pool to encourage the swan to leave. I am sure that it can climb up when it needs to.

The pair of Common Terns were back on the Long Water, with the male bringing fish to the female as before. There were three male Reed Warblers singing, one in the reeds near the Diana fountain and two on the Long Water.

There are two species of damselfly on the plants in the lookout spot next to the bridge. This is a Bluetail Damselfy, Ischnura heterostatica.

The other species, which has an all-blue abdomen, is the Common Damselfly, Enalagma cyathigerum.

I was alarmed to hear from Peter Scott, the head of Bluebird Boats, that the people who are operating racing skiffs on the lake have applied to have the Long Water opened up for their activities. The Long Water is a sanctuary and breeding ground for water birds of many kinds, and allowing fast-moving boats propelled by unskilled rowers into it, especially during the nesting season, would be a gross act of environmental vandalism. I very much hope that their plan will be rejected.