Long-Tailed Tit nest near the bridge

One of the Long-Tailed Tits building a nest near the bridge arrived with a bit of moss ...

... and disappeared into the brambles.

After a sunny spell it started raining, probably pleasing the Redwings on the Parade Ground as it made worms easier to get.

Two Mistle Thrushes were with them, but impossibly far away so here's the resident one on Buck Hill.

This Feral Pigeon at the Triangle car park has the standard Rock Dove plumage pattern, light with two dark wing bars, but is pale brown. This variation happens when it has little or none of the usual black eumelanin pigment, but a normal amount of ginger phaeomelanin. The same thing is seen in red-haired humans.

Here the pattern has broken up into blocks of black, white and grey, which happens when the gene that controls the standard pattern is suppressed. You see the same thing in male ducks, whose sex hormones disrupt the mechanism that forms the repeating pattern of females.

When one bird in a group starts preening, usually the others do too. But here a Coot swimming past a group of preening Greylag Geese gets the urge from their example.

The Egyptian Geese with six goslings became nervous when a Carrion Crow got too near, but a determined advance sent it away.

The wind was still strong, which encouraged a Mute Swan to do a bit of flying.

Swans are not always in harmonious pairs. The female here didn't fancy mating at all.

The male swan in the Italian Garden was puzzled by the unaccustomed peace. The garden is closed all week while the people from Hydro Cleansing try to sort out the pipe blockage that has taken out first the marble fountain and then the five fountains inside the garden enclosure.

These grave-like structures at the back of the loggia of the Italian Garden are three vaults through which the Westbourne river originally discharged into the Long Water before its increasing foulness prompted Prince Albert to have it routed around the park in a pipe while the lake was filled from a clean borehole.

Originally the ground level would have been higher and the vaults would have been covered with soil. The old ground level is marked by the transition in the wall from rough stonework to knapped flints, which were intended to give a rustic Gothic look.

We've seen the next two pictures before. This is the other side of the wall, showing two of the three arches at the ends of the vaults. The structure dates from the creation of the lake at the end of the 1720s.

This is what the top of the Long Water looked like in the mid-19th century, before the Italian Garden was built in 1860. It's not clear how the fountain was powered, but since it's at the bottom of a slope it might be by an artesian well.