Wednesday 23 June 2021

Several young Long-Tailed Tits bustled around in trees near the Albert Memorial. The bird you can hear in the background is a Great Spotted Woodpecker, probably the very vocal female I filmed yesterday. Today I couldn't see it through the leaves, but some holes in the top of a tree are probably its work.

This is one of the parents.

Neil got a fine picture of a Great Tit feeding a fledgling in the corkscrew hazel in the Flower Walk.

A young Carrion Crow pestered a parent in a tree.

Magpies basked in the sunshine.

A Stock Dove wandered through the grass, smaller and neater than a Feral Pigeon and with big dark eyes.

The oldest Great Crested Grebe chick on the Long Water is now very active, diving after its parent and sometimes by itself. It was given a fish.

There seems to be only one Great Crested Grebe chick in the nest under the willow.

Virginia got a fine close-up shot of it.

The single Mute Swan cygnet from the nest at the boathouse had a hard time getting up the kerb to rest beside its mother, but eventually managed.

This Egyptian Goose is the blond father of the two blond goslings, expelled by an aggressive male who took over the goslings as well as his mate. He is regrowing his wings after moulting.

A Honeybee worked over the Viper's Bugloss flowers at the back of the Lido.

Two female Emperor dragonflies laid eggs on a reed stem.

Unusually among dragonflies, male Black-Tailed Skimmers are much less showy than their bright yellow and black females.

Another picture by Neil: a spider at the southwest corner of the bridge. He can't identify the species and neither can I.

Update: Conehead 54 tells me that it's a Tetragnatha species, frequently found by water.

4 comments:

  1. Lovely shots of the synchronised female Emperors egg laying. At last they had a day when conditions were good for them after what seemed like late October rather than mid June!

    The spider is a Tetragnatha sp, frequently found by water.

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  2. Thanks for the identification.

    I thought I was seeing double or the viewfinder on the camera had gone wrong when I was taking the picture of the female Emperors, and was surprised to find that they were really there.

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  3. Love the video of the Long Tailed Tit. It will lift anyone's spirits.

    Congrats to Virginia on the lovely close up of the Grebe baby!

    It's always weird to think that those small stubby wings will become the powerful wings of a swan.

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    1. Swans start to fly very late, which is just as well because they are very unmanoeuvrable with a huge turning circle, and if teenagers started looning around in the air they would soon hit an obstacle and crash.

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