A Long-Tailed Tit perched head downwards waiting its turn on a feeder at Kensington Palace.
Here is another bird that is equally happy upside down: a Nuthatch in the leaf yard, staring at me intently with its black eyes because it wanted me to put some food on the fence for it.
More Robins are pairing up. These were in a bramble patch next to the hazel thicket across the path from the leaf yard.
A month ago it would have been impossible for two Robins to get this close without fighting.
The Cetti's Warbler is still singing in his usual place on the west side of the Long Water. I couldn't see him at all today.
The male Tawny Owl was also invisible, and hadn't come out on his usual perch by the time I passed the place last, at 4.40 pm.
However, the Scaup was on the Serpentine, on the north side this time not far from the bridge, where he was going around with some Tufted Ducks. He came quite close to the edge.
The young Mute Swan is still alone on the pond in the Italian Garden. A few days ago it varied its routine by changing to one of the other ponds, but is now back where it started. Here it is crusing under the fountain.
Both Grey Heron nests on the Serpentine island are still occupied. There was one bird in each, and the other two were on the ground looking at each other suspiciouly.
A pair of Great Crested Grebes were fishing around the wire basket at the south end of the bridge.
When I had crossed to the other side of the lake they started displaying, and it was clear that they were going to dance. I was much too far away to run back in time, and had the wet-weather lens on the camera, which doesn't have the reach of the big lens, so the following picture is a very poor one. But it does show one thing. Grebes have the basic moves of their dance hard-wired into their brains (and incidentally share this with the big American Aechmophorus grebes). But they have to practise it to get it right, and this pair is inexperienced. When they got to the stage where they dive and come up with weed to wave at each other, one of them emerged with nothing. And the other had pulled up a tatty black plastic bag, which is a useful nesting material for grebes but much too big to wave.
Anyway, they will get it right soon.
I love the story about the Grebes struggling to perfect their courting dance. The image of the bedraggled black plastic bag dredged romantically up from the depths will stay with me. Looking forward to more photos as they perfect their 'moves'.
ReplyDeleteIt really ought to be a good romantic symbol of a durable nest keeping the eggs safe. Polythene is a much better building material than soggy reeds, and grebes prefer it. Sometimes you see a bag travelling briskly across the lake, apparently by itself, and then it stops midway and a grebe comes up for a breather before diving again and towing it farther.
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