Tuesday 28 January 2020

Word has gone out among the Redwings that the Winter Wasteland site on the Parade Ground is now empty, and a lot more have turned up. Some perched in the trees ...


... and others came down to look for worms in the ruined grass.


They were accompanied by Starlings ...


... and a Mistle Thrush.


This Starling preferred to hunt on one of the surviving patches of grass.


Mark Williams found a Song Thrush in St James's Park singing ...


... to the accompaniment of a passing military band.


This is the female Blackbird in the Rose Garden who comes out to take sultanas. I had already fed her, so she was content to be photographed.


More Chaffinches have turned up near the bridge again, and there are now four or five.


Ahmet Amerikali spent half an hour in the freezing wind at the leaf yard, and was rewarded with excellent shots of a Goldcrest eating a spider ...


... the very shy Coal Tit ...


... and a Long-Tailed Tit hanging upside down.


One of the Grey Herons nesting on the south side of the island was looking intently into the nest. This is one of those times when you wish you had a drone with a camera to see what's in it.


The Polish Black-Headed Gull with ring T4UN is now growing the dark head of its breeding plumage ready for the spring, when it will fly back to Truskaw where it was hatched in 2012.


A visit to the Round Pond found the Black Swan still cruising around majestically.


Work on the Italian Garden fountains continues. The submerged semicircular wall has been topped with sandbags and drained.


This thing was a water filter used when the fountains were powered by a steam engine, intended to stop floating debris from getting into the pump. But now the five smaller fountains are a closed system with the water recirculating through a filter in the engine house, and I thought that the big marble fountain was fed directly from a borehole and is the means by which water is sent into the lake. But evidently the old filter still has some purpose. It used to have solid cast iron gratings over the top, but these are now mostly broken and have been replaced with pieces of modern weldmesh, which were not strong enough and have collapsed.

10 comments:

  1. I haven’t seen any Redwings this winter so I am looking forward to seeing them when I visit the park later this week

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    1. They should still be here a week from now. But don't wait too long, for when the returfing operation gets into full swing it frightens them away.

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  2. That Song Thrush asserting its musical superiority over the military band is so evocative. I wish I could say something witty in its connection, but I can only say that I love its song so much.

    Well done to Ahmet for some lovely pictures, even if they were obtained at the price of a lot of discomfort.

    I wonder how thrushes tell one another about the best spots.

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    1. The Redwings seem to have both good communications and good timing. Every year the Winter Wasteland gets bigger and takes longer to dismantle. Therefore their small scout party turned up two days early this year, and had to pass the time on the other side of the Serpentine where there are trees and wormy grass to their liking, but also people and dogs to disturb them. As soon as the Wasteland site was reasonably quiet they flew in. Next day there were a lot more of them on the site.

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  3. I hope T4UN is not deterred from returning after Brexit. Jim

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  4. The redwings could be with us a little longer. Last year I noted a group of them scouring the grass together with a flock of starlings just north of Physical Energy on 11 February. It was the joining in of the starlings that intrigued me and made me note it. Safety in numbers? Or something else, I wonder.

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    1. I've often seen Redwings on the patch of wood chips under the plane trees on the east side of the path most of the way from Physical Energy to the Speke obelisk. It seems that the park ecologists' loony experiment with wood chips attracts insects as well as diverse fungi.

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  5. Lovely shots of the Redwing. They do seem to be in short supply this winter though there's been a small group in my local park. I had a long weekend in Norfolk last week birding with friends + didn't see one but came across one small flock of Fieldfare in a hedge.

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    1. We haven't had any Fieldfares yet, but usually a few arrive in the wake of the Redwings.

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