It was a very windy day. Herring Gulls and Black-Headed Gulls enjoyed soaring in the gusts.
The Grey Heron parent in the nest with a chick did a bit of maintenance while the nest swayed violently.
A Great Crested Grebe bounced up and down in the choppy waves.
Overnight rain had caused the little stream in the Dell to overflow its banks. An adult Moorhen and a teenager (browner, on the left) explored the muddy edge.
The area of the Serpentine and Long Water together is said to be 40 acres, about 160,000 square metres. If 1 centimetre of rain falls on it, that's 1,600 cubic metres of water, that is 1,600 tonnes, to dispose of, and it all goes into the stream before it disappears into the underground culvert that leads through Knightsbridge and Chelsea to the Thames.
A Coot made a nest from reeds on the Long Water.
They can make nests of reeds or twigs, or both, with equal skill. The Great Crested Grebes here, on the other hand, can't cope with reeds. That's odd, because the grebes in places like the Norfolk Broads where there is no other material manage perfectly well.
The Egyptian Geese at the Henry Moore sculpture had a loud display. The male was making the most noise -- the hoarse panting sound -- when usually it's the quacking female who is noisier. I take this as as sign that he's encouraging her to nest, which she will do in a hollow tree nearby.
The aggressive male Mute Swan on the Serpentine was being his usual self ...
... and the one in the Italian Garden was sitting stolidly in the middle of the path expecting people to walk round him.
A small flock of Redwings looked for worms under the trees on the Parade Ground.
A Starling shone in the sunlight at the Lido restaurant.
A female Chaffinch looked down from a twig near the bridge ...
... where a Blue Tit was pecking at leaf buds. I had supposed that it was looking for insects ...
... but in fact it was eating the actual buds, a useful source of food at a time when there aren't many insects around.
A Robin sang in a bush in the Rose Garden ...
... where daffodils were coming up in unexpected places, interrupting the gardeners' careful arrangements of the herbaceous borders.
I guess I am going to reveal the depth of my ignorance, but do buds have pollen? It would then be high calorie and very nutritious.
ReplyDeleteI like it when swans refuse to budge. They do it because they can, like gulls soaring in the air like so many kites (the non-bird kind).
I would have thought that flower buds contained the ingredients for forming pollen in a flower, but leaf buds didn't. On the other hand I think they must have other things than cellulose -- fat, protein, sugar?
DeleteThe swans in the park, ever keen for dominance, know that they can dominate humans, and do so at every opportunity.