Thursday 18 March 2021

A Pied Wagtail ran around confidently in the Diana fountain enclosure, happy to come near because there were railings separating us and it knew I couldn't get over them.


A Wren posed grandly on the railings.


Another Wren was poking around in the leaf litter in the woodland at the foot of Buck Hill ...


... accompanied by a Moorhen. Dead leaves attract all manner of insects and small invertebrates and are a precious resource, yet the park management insists on quite unnecessarily blowing them out of the shrubberies.


A Song Thrush looked for worms in the grass beside Rotten Row.


The male Nuthatch reappeared in the yew tree in the leaf yard.


There are now two Blue Tits that follows us down the east side of the Long Water expecting pine nuts.


There were still seven Egyptian goslings at the Henry Moore sculpture, but the hungry Carrion Crows had their eyes on them. The gander chased off a Jackdaw and a crow.


There are often a lot of Jackdaws here now. I don't think they present much of a threat to goslings, though the larger crows certainly do.


The dominant male Mute Swan at the west end of the Serpentine was being his usual violent self.


The long running contest between the two male swans at the island may have been settled. One was sitting on the shore arranging twigs to make a nest.


Two teenage swans were enjoying a bit of puppy love on the Long Water. They won't try to breed until they're at least two years old.


Paul took this splendid picture of a female Kestrel at Richmond Park, perfectly camouflaged in a dead tree.


Tom was at Rainham Marshes, where he got a fine shot of a male Bearded Tit with a comedy villain moustache ...


and at Belhus Woods Country Park close by, where he saw a Red Kite.

6 comments:

  1. That female Kestrel is such a beauty!
    The Bearded Tit looks every inch the villain, including wearing a suitable expression.

    No wonder the Wren is striking such a regal pose. A long time ago they were kings of all birds, after all.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I think the Wren got into the story of the King of the Birds by mistake -- the ancients were pretty vague about species, and translators no better. I think the true king is the Goldcrest (Regulus regulus), the smallest of Old World birds and wearing a golden crown.

      Delete
  2. Great shots of the Wren & the lovely Nuthatch. Jackdaws do seem to be increasing- I do enjoy them & see them locally (many at my local patch of Ten Acre Wood). Noted that Des McKenzie saw a pair collecting nesting material on your patch yesterday. He also reported 6 Lesser Redpoll in birches near Rima (I have no idea what or where that is in the Park?). Interestingly we found a female of these locally yesterday feeding with 5 Goldfinches-it came down from a low branch in a poplar to some seedheads about 4 metres from us, so some wonderful views. The first I've seen in Perivale Park.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I've seen four pairs of Jackdaws looking at nest holes, though one pair has since been pushed out by Stock Doves. Rima is the usual name for what is marked on maps as the Hudson Memorial, on the south side of the screen of trees around the Hyde Park greenhouses. Will go there now.

      Delete
  3. Thanks for enlightening me Ralph about Rima.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Rima is the subject of the ugly Epstein relief on the Hudson Memorial, a lumpy girl flanked by birds. W.H. Hudson is remembered as a naturalist, but his day job was writing popular romantic novels, and his Green Mansions was a bestseller. An English naturalist visits the South American rainforest, finds a 'lost' tribe, falls in love with one of them, a girl named Rima who dresses in spiders' webs and speaks the language of the birds. It ends tragically. You can read it on Project Gutenberg. I barely made it to the top of page 2.

      Delete