Thursday 17 May 2018

The male Little Owl near the leaf yard is now well screened by new leaves on the chestnut tree, and quite hard to find.


He enjoyed a bit of preening.


Two Blue Tits delicately picked pieces out of pine nuts. They could swallow it in one go, but like to savour this delicious treat.


The pigeon-eating Lesser Black-Backed Gull was back in his old hunting ground at the Dell restaurant. He prowled around a bit but couldn't see any catchable pigeons, so he stopped to preen.


A Grey Wagtail looked for insects in the debris washed up on the edge of the Serpentine. They like the terrace of the Lido restaurant because a line of planters screens them from human view.


A Mallard with four ducklings at the Vista ate little insects off the surface of the lake. The young ones got a few too.


The Canada Geese at the Lido took their 15 goslings up the bank to eat the lush grass.


The other pair of Canadas still have their two.

The hopeless Egyptian Geese whose chicks never survive were relaxing on the ornamental rock at the north end of the Long Water. This rock is used by a wide variety of birds, and we could do with some more of these perches.


There have been severe losses at the Round Pond, where the Egyptians  are down from ten goslings to just four.


Update: No, Virginia tells me that this picture is misleading. The two larger goslings belong to the aggressive pair. The two smaller ones belong to the newly hatched brood, and had wandered off and become attached to the wrong parents. She rescued them and restored them to the right family.

The Coots here on the platform with the solar panel still have their two chicks, which can shelter from gulls by staying under the panel. One of them ventured out to be fed.


The Coots at the north end of the Long Water fed their chicks under the parapet of the Italian Garden.


The Great Crested Grebes at the island still have two chicks.


But the low stock of fish in the lake can be shown by the fact that we have only one Cormorant at present. It was perched on a branch of the fallen horse chestnut tree in the Long Water.


A female Broad-Bodied Chaser dragonfly (Libellula depressa) perched on a stem in the Rose Garden. This is quite a common species, but this is the first time I've got a photograph of one in the park. (And how I wish the camera repair shop would hurry up with servicing my good lens.)


The shelter at the foot of Buck Hill is home to every possible kind of dance and martial art. You never know what you are going to see there.

7 comments:

  1. I wonder if the mobile phone is going to be part of the performance , or if she just can't help herself.

    ReplyDelete
  2. She stopped dancing to answer it, and I stopped filming. Humans are slaves of the tiny machine.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I think the man on the viewer's left is doing capoeira, or it looks very much like it. The woman isn't, though. Where they performing in tandem?

    What's happened to your good lens? I hope it's not broken.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks. I really have no idea what they were doing but they seemed to be moving at the same speed. I could hear no music. Maybe from her mobile via a shared pair of Bluetooth earphones.

      I took the lens in to be cleaned, as the bellows action of the zoom had caused it to take in a lot of dust. The man said ten days but it's been a month now.

      Delete
  4. Pedant's corner. One of the hopeless Egyptian Geese' young may have survived! Jim.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes, I should have said 'who never raised a chick' because one of them was brought up by another pair. But you do quibble so.

      Delete
    2. Dunno. I am no native speaker, but I understood perfectly well what Ralph meant.

      Delete