You can get Pied Wagtails to come quite close to you by standing upwind of them, holding up the camera so as not to make a sudden movement, and waiting for them to approach. They almost always run upwind to avoid their feathers getting ruffled. This grey female is one of a pair that hunt in front of Kensington Palace
This Mute Swan was cruising downwind, so he was getting ruffled. He was on a dense carpet of dead leaves blown by the wind to the east end of the Serpentine.
Nearby, a young Herring Gull had collected a good bundle of leaves and was dropping them in the lake and picking them up again.
This gull is about 18 months old and is beginning to get adult pale grey feathers on its back. Before it reached this stage, you could have told that it is a Herring Gull and not a Lesser Black-Back by the whitish tips of its inner primaries. On a Lesser Black-Back the primaries have dark tips all the way along.
Near the island a Carrion Crow was having a vigorous bath, momentarily in the pose of a figure of Winged Victory.
The Mandarins have been elusive recently; I think that some are spending time ashore opposite Peter Pan, but some or all of them may have gone up the Regent's Canal, where there are always a fair number of them. Today this pair turned up at Peter Pan.
A Great Crested Grebe had caught a good-sized perch that had been sheltering under the dead willow tree near the Italian Garden. The fish was safe from herons but not from grebes.
The female Tawny Owl was in the beech tree, preening one of her big feathery feet.
She usually stands on one foot anyway. You can see how her toes take a strong X-shaped grip of the branch. They also use this grip for seizing mice. It is only when they are standing on a flat surface that they adopt the usual bird foot position of three toes forward and one back. The opposable toe is outermost one, conventionally numbered 4; number 1 is the permanently rear-facing one corresponding to a human big toe.
iSuperb photos as ever. We saw the mandarins and female tawny today, too, as well as four green woodpeckers at surprisingly close quarters on the archery grounds.
ReplyDeleteyes, agree re the photos - thank you. and crikey, had forgotten how gaudy the Mandarins get- even the duck.
ReplyDeleteThank you both for your kind words. So far I have only managed to see three Green Wooidpeckers on the Archery Field. They seem to feel secure with the railings between them and you.
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