More very welcome photographs from readers while I am immobilised. You can send pictures to me at kensingtonbirds@gmail.com.

To start with pictures from the park, here's one from Virginia, who was given a severe stare by a female Tufted Duck.

A few days ago I shot this video of a female Shoveller coming in to the edge of the Serpentine and poling herself along with her feet while feeding. She didn't have a companion to circle with and stir up little water creatures, so she had to travel quite fast to slurp up enough food in her enormous bill.

David Element got a dramatic shot of two Gadwall drakes fighting. They are usually quite peaceful ducks, not like the perpetually quarrelsome Mallards.

Also by him, a Cormorant flying down the lake.

This picture by Cathy shows a Great Crested Grebe in winter plumage on the upper Thames at Sonning.

When the park lake freezes, our grebes leave and go up the Thames, probably not as far upriver as Sonning, since you can find grebes anywhere above Chiswick. But they can't build their floating nests on the tidal Thames, so they can only nest upstream from Teddington, above which the Thames is a normal river, and there are plenty of weedy backwaters with little current where nests can be built. The name Teddington is a corruption of 'tide end town'.

Ian Young went to St James's Park to check on the Black Swans, and found all eight of the new colony.

Neither of these is 'our' sadly missed swan. She is now quite hard to spot, since she is just the female in one of the couples and has become quite orderly in her behaviour. She is quite small compared to most of the others, and has the pure white flight feathers of an adult rather than the black-tipped feathers of the four teenagers. She has bright red eyes, while the younger swans still have red-brown eyes. These two differences will vanish during the coming year when the teenagers grow up. But she has the finest and most upstanding ruffles of any Black Swan in that park, and should retain them.

More swans in Krakow photographed by Justyna C., a dense crowd with a Mallard having nowhere to go, so it stood on one of them.

Although these are Mute Swans in Poland, they are not necessarily 'Polish Swans', the form of the Mute Swan that has pale pinkish-grey feet and a pink bill, and whose cygnets are white instead of grey. Some may well be, but the pale bill is not an infallible mark since young normal swans also have a pale bill. You have to be able to see their feet.

The name was given to them because the first ones to be identified as a distinct morph happened to come from Poland. But the 'Polish' form does become more frequent as you go east through Europe, reaching 20 per cent of the total. They are rare in western Europe except in the Netherlands. This is one in Hyde Park which I photographed in 2016.

Here are two pictures from Derek Polley the Belfast Birder, whose blog you can find here. They show the results of sprinkling millet on the shore to attract wading birds. Much of the time you just get a mob of Moorhens ...

... but sometimes you get Ruffs and Black-Tailed Godwits.

This is something that might work at Rainham Marshes, which has both these species but they are normally 200 yards away and hard to photograph.

A picture from Rainham by Tom: this solitary Waxwing stayed near the visitor centre for a long time and became quite tame.

Another one by him from Thursley Common, a fine view of a Redstart.

Tinúviel and her husband Emilio have just visited the Los Barruecos nature reserve near Cáceres in Extremadura. Here is a pleasing picture of some Black-Winged Stilts stalking around on their absurdly long legs.

There are artificial nest sites for White Storks on poles, which make the birds look like stylite hermits in the desert.