Sunday 4 October 2020

A day of steady drizzle. A Grey Heron near the Italian Garden looked rather depressed.

Shovellers don't care how wet it is ...

... and neither do Tufted Ducks.

Blackbirds welcome rain, as it brings up worms.

Starlings feasted on wireworms in the soggy grass near the Round Pond. (Wireworms are not actually worms, they are the long thin larvae of click beetles.)

A male Pied Wagtail worked round the edge of the pond. They prefer the placed where waves have broken over the kerb, leaving little pools which seem to have stranded water creatures in them.

A female Chaffinch dug up a larva in the bushes near the bridge.

A Long-Tailed Tit hung from a twig ...

... and let go to fly away.

A young Herring Gull on the Serpentine had a vigorous wash and flap, and found a dead leaf which interested it for a second.

A Moorhen enjoyed climbing around on the moored rowing boats.

Cormorants contemplated the large orange plastic buoy which arrived at the Serpentine island several months ago.

Mute Swans like the taste of reeds. If it weren't for the netting around the reed bed they'd get in and completely trash it.

The pale Egyptian Goose at the Italian Garden and her mate are among the oldest inhabitants of the park. They arrived twenty years ago. They have now stopped trying to breed, a relief for all as they were hopeless parents and always lost all their goslings in a few days.

A clump of Honey Fungus glistened in the rain on a felled tree trunk.


Note: I've discovered why the videos in recent posts have not been appearing when the blog is viewed on a mobile phone. The disastrous Blogger update which has broken several things has introduced a different embedding code that doesn't work on mobiles. In this post I have put in an embedding code obtained from YouTube, inserted by hand in the HTML text of the blog. This now works on my mobile. Please let me know in the comments whether it has worked on your phone.

10 comments:

  1. This now works fine on my iPhone. Thanks for fixing it. I have just been enjoying the video of the young swans eating reeds. One of them looked rather angry about something, with its part-raised wings.

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    1. Thanks. Looking back over past blog posts, Blogger seem to have fouled up their code some time ago, and I shan't have the time to go back and perform the tricky manual correction of HTML code retrospectively. But I will do it on future posts until Blogger fix their rotten interface (which, judging by the past performance of Google, won't be soon). Wish this problem had surfaced earlier.

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  2. That solves the issue!! No problem on the desktop but videos vanished on mobile devices (I tried 6 different ones) Apologies for not letting you know, I fully intended to!!

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  3. Yippee! Normal service resumed.... Thanks for sorting out the hiccup 😊

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    1. Thanks. Hope they repair the fault (though on past form I doubt they'll do it for months). Writing video insertion instructions by hand in HTML is a bore.

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  4. Now I'm almost glad that I own a dumbphone.

    Impressive form on that Long Tailed Tit's pull-up from a staggeringly low dead hang. Quite the little athlete!

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  5. Videos still don't appear on your email on my Android tablet. OK if I go to the web site. Otherwise, I find your daily updates fascinating. Thank you.

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    1. Only the videos on this post and Monday's have been corrected, as it takes ages to do the insertions now because I have to put in the HTML code by hand. Previous pages are still faulty, going back a couple of weeks. But the corrected videos are OK on my Android phone now, and on other people's Android phones and iPhones, so I don't know what's wrong if you can't see the videos in this post. I'm using official insertion commands from YouTube, so it really ought to be all right, but if it isn't I'm afraid I can do no more until the people at Blogger sort out the many serious bugs in their new interface.

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