Two Mandarin drakes turned up at Peter Pan, the first seen in the park this year, or indeed for several months.

There was no sign of females. Very likely they are lurking in the shrubbery on the other side of the lake, as Mandarins have in previous years. They spend long periods ashore and their nest in a tree hole is often quite a long way from the water.

A Little Grebe was fishing industriously under the trunk of a fallen tree on the east side of the Long Water.

The Robins are pairing up.

This pair kept especially close to each other because there was a third Robin above them in the tree, singing aggressively.

A Green Woodpecker was hunting for insects and worms near the back of the Orangery at Kensington Palace.

There is a team of archaeologists here digging a trench to find the remains of a wall that was marked on old maps of the palace. A Robin would have come straight in and looked for worms in the turned-up earth, but the shy woodpecker kept at a safe distance, and probably intended to wait till the diggers knocked off for the day.

There was a Treecreeper on a birch tree near the Tawny Owls' nest tree, probing the cracks in the bark with its long curved beak to find insects.

It seems just as well camouflaged on a silver birch as it would be on a tree with conventional dark bark.

The female Tawny Owl came out of the nest very briefly around 9 am, as reported by Paul Turner. By the time I arrived she had gone back inside long before, and only the male was visible, standing guard in his usual place. Here he is looking down suspiciously at a squirrel that was climbing towards him.