A flock of Long-Tailed Tits in a hawthorn tree ...
... carried along with it Great Tits ...
... Blue Tits ...
... and a Coal Tit, arriving late on the next tree and about to fly into the ever popular hawthorn.
The Grey Wagtail was back at the Dell restaurant.
A Wren in the Dell, photographed by Ahmet Amerikali.
A Lesser Black-Backed Gull kept the Carrion Crows away from the pigeon it was eating, one of the pigeon killer's leftovers. This gull with pale legs is constantly around the area and seems to be tolerated by the pigeon killer and his mate.
The crows had a pigeon of their own, possibly dead of natural causes. They were eating it in the middle of the Serpentine Road.
The Cormorants are now numerous enough to fish in mobs, an efficient method as one bird sactters the fish towards another. Thanks again to Ahmet for this picture. He said that there were ten in this group. You can never get them all on the surface together.
A Cormorant at the Serpentine island splashed about and leapt on to a post to dry.
A Moorhen in the Italian Garden had climbed as high as possible in a patch of purple loosestrife and was eating the seeds.
A couple of stale bagels defeated the best efforts of Mute Swans, Canada Geese and Coots to eat them.
A sunny day brought out the insects again, which were attracted to a clump of plumbago in the Rose Garden. There were a Honeybee ...
... a Common Carder bee ...
... and a tattered Small White butterfly ...
... while a dead leaf in the clump made a perch for a lustrous Greenbottle fly.
Neil found a small god about two feet tall under a tree near the Serpentine Gallery. I've occasionally seen Hindu gods in the park, but nothing like this.
Neither of us knows how to place it. The protruding tongue and style of painting suggest India, but the form is more like that of a Hawaiian tiki god or a figure on a North American totem pole.
Sometimes you will find that sort of devil-like idol carefully left behind in parks and near bodies of water, but I don't think this one is the usual African or Afrocaribbean sort. As long as it doesn't turn into a turtle we'll be fine, though.
ReplyDeleteWe've got turtles, or at least terrapins. They're easier to deal with than gods.
DeleteBagels weren't meant for eating on Yom Kippur, as it was, anyway.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure if I'd heard of plumbago, or leadwort, but it made for some interesting reading. Jim
Just as well, then, that the birds couldn't make any impression on them.
DeleteIt's quite a spectacle to watch the gangs of Cormorants feeding like this. Normally at Ruislip Lido I see a handful (sometimes none) of birds but when I was there on Saturday about 60 birds, with c30 on the beach & the rest foraging as a working group. I suspect similar to what you experience there once they have removed a lot of the larger fish they will move off. Remember last year there was a large flock like this & Perch seemed to be one of the main species caught.
ReplyDeleteGood to see a number of insects still. Yesterday was more pleasant but working in Battersea yesterday only managed to see a Common Darter.
At peak Cormorant time I have seen a line of 20+ birds moving across the lake like a police search party, eating everything in their path.
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