The Great Crested Grebes on the Long Water now have two chicks.

From the way both birds keep fussing around the nest, it seems that more eggs may be hatching.

Four new Moorhen chicks have emerged at Peter Pan. They kept well into the safety of the edge.

A Coot added the finishing touches to the new nest in the water lilies in the Italian Garden. Perhaps the incentive for making a second nest was that the chick is now too large to get through the netting to reach the original one, but Coots build unstoppably anyway.

Another Coot ate a fallen plum. There are two plum trees on the edge of the Serpentine below the Triangle car park, both with good edible fruit, but you hardly see this because people come in early in the morning and pick it.

A pair of Pochards on the Long Water. I did my monthly water bird count today and found 41 Pochards, though quite likely there were more hidden in the bushes.

There are sadly few females among them. Ducks usually have a skewed sex ratio because females are predated as they nest on the ground, but in Pochards it's extreme. The species is red-listed.

A young Herring Gull dredged up a mysterious lump of something from the bottom of the lake and played with it for a while.

A Grey Heron is constantly on the dead Chinese privet tree at the northwest corner of the bridge, which is an excellent lookout point for rats in the bushes.

The male Little Owl looked down from the nest tree.

A young Blackbird ate fruit in one of the rowan trees on Buck Hill.

A Carrion Crow stole a bit of apple that someone was feeding to the Rose-Ringed Parakeets at the leaf yard.

A Jackdaw looked out appealingly from a branch. Of course I gave it a peanut, which it managed to grab before the crows muscled in.

Starlings massed in a tree in the Diana fountain enclosure.

I counted 115 at the Round Pond and 136 in Hyde Park, more than expected. Possibly they had flown from one place to the other and got counted twice.

A Speckled Wood butterfly perched on a leaf beside the Long Water.

I read that they are fiercely territorial and the males may fight for as long as an hour and a half. Not sure whether the wing damage is caused by fighting, bird attack, or ordinary wear and tear.

A Common Darter dragonfly perched on a tree stump near the owls' tree ...

... and there was a clump of small fungi an inch or two across under a nearby chestnut. I thought they were puffballs, but our fungus expert Mario writes, 'It is an earthball, probably the Common Earthball (Scleroderma citrinum). Earthballs are harder than puffballs; they are purple/brown inside; and they are responsible for poisoning because some people confuse them with truffles!' I had never even heard of an earthball.