The Long-Tailed Tits nesting near the Italian Garden hung around in the hawthorn tree, not daring to go to their nest because that would have revealed its location to a Carrion Crow on the ground. Actually I think they were safe enough, as the nest is deep in a bramble patch.

A Blackcap sang from a yew tree near the Queen's Temple.

A Dunnock looked for insects under a bench in the Rose Garden. It's a good hunting ground because people sit on the bench eating food and dropping crumbs, which attract insects.

The young Grey Wagtails were wandering around in the scrubby bushes east of the Lido restaurant, looking more or less efficiently for insects.

I think the nest was under a wooden shack a few feet away. There used to be some pretty flowering bushes around the restaurant terrace, but these were vandalised by the restaurant management to make space for a bar and an ice cream van, and only a few square feet remain.

The Coots nesting on the wire basket at the bridge have eight eggs. Virginia got a dramatic picture looking down from the bridge as the birds were changing places.

A new Coot nest has appeared in one of the planters in the Italian Garden.

The Mute Swan nesting east of the Lido was turning over her six eggs.

A pair of Egyptian Geese on the Serpentine have four new goslings.

Another fine picture from Virginia, of one of the blond Egyptian goslings flapping its developing wings.

We don't have any Greylag goslings in Hyde Park, since the geese have almost abandoned trying to nest because of the numerous foxes. So I filmed these in St James's Park, where there are two broods of six and one.

I had gone to St James's Park because Jorgen had reported an unusual event. A Mute Swan has some new cygnets, but she has lost her mate and is now partnered by a Black Swan, which Jorgen thinks is the one we had in Hyde Park several years ago. The cygnets are ordinary Mute ones, not hybrids. I got a picture of the pair side by side, but they were hard to see in the bushes and I couldn't see the cygnets at all.

Leaving St James's Park I went along Birdcage Walk, so called because James I set up a royal aviary there. Only the British royal family and the Hereditary Grand Falconer, the Duke of St Albans, were permitted to drive along the road until 1828. It is bordered by the back gardens of the grand 17th century houses in Queen Anne's Gate. There were a Blackbird ...

... and a Robin in the bushes. Not a birdcage in sight, happily.

Back in Kensington Gardens, all five terrapins were visible on the fallen horse chestnut tree.

A Buff-Tailed Bumblebee browsed on Birdseye flowers.

Duncan Campbell told me that the incident of the Bee-Grabber Fly was not the only one he had witnessed. In July 2020 he took this remarkable picture of a different species, a Ferruginous Bee-Grabber Fly, attacking what he thinks was a Forest Cuckoo Bee -- it doesn't have the second stripe of a Buff-Tailed Bumblebee.

In both cases the bee is doomed. During the brief attack the fly lays an egg in the victim's abdomen, which eats the bee's innards and eventually bursts out like the Alien in that terrifying film.