A wet morning and a sunny afternoon

It was a drizzly morning. A young Wood Pigeon looked wet and miserable.

A Great Tit near the bridge flew into a heavily infested tree to collect larvae for its chicks ...

... which were waiting in the next tree.

Young Long-Tailed Tits at the Serpentine outflow were also loudly demanding to be fed.

A Starling arrived at its nest in the eaves of the Buck Hill shelter with a caterpillar for its young.

This Robin in the leaf yard comes to my hand to collect four or five pine nuts.

The Wrens on Buck Hill were protesting loudly at Magpies. There has been a family of Magpies around the Henry Moore sculpture for years, and the Wrens ought to have realised this before choosing their nest sites.

One of the young Grey Wagtails -- I'm not sure from which family -- could be heard under the willow near the bridge, and I got a rather indistinct shot through the leaves.

The Reed Warblers were still unusually visible around the Italian Garden today. Their nest is somewhere in the reed bed in the third shot.

The Great Crested Grebe chick on the Long Water is almost as big as its parents.

The Coot chicks in the Italian Garden are now diving for a lot of their own food, though this object, which I think is a rotted plane leaf, was a mistake and the chick dropped it.

The Egyptian Goose on the Long Water with the outsized gosling watched her brood going through the railings. But there was a Carrion Crow hanging around ominously on the far side.

She could have backed off and flown out, but decided to see if she could squeeze through the railings. She just managed it ...

... and charged off to chase away the crow.

A bit of water helps with preening. A pair of Mandarins at the edge of the Long Water took advantage of the morning drizzle.

A Mallard at the Lido has done very well to bring up four teenagers. They are now full size but still growing their flight feathers.

A remarkable picture by Duncan Campbell of a Ruby-Tailed Wasp.

I'll leave him to describe it: 'They are apparently very difficult to separate, but this is possibly Chrysis ignita, one the most common. They are nest parasitoid cuckoo wasps and one of their main hosts is the mason bees. I took over 50 pictures trying to get something half decent. The main reasons for the difficulty in getting a picture was that they are not only small (up to 12mm), but are very fast movers. From Wiki : "Their characteristic "scurry and fly" search pattern when looking for hosts is quite distinctive, even when seen from a distance. They land on a surface, typically either soil or wood, and scurry a short distance, in quick, hesitant spurts, with their antennae quivering vigorously as they go -- and then they abruptly take off, typically only flying a short distance before landing again and repeating the manoeuvre. They are generally kleptoparasites, laying their eggs in host nests, where their larvae consume the host, egg, or larva while it is still young, then consuming the provisions". Apart from the spectacular colouring, one of the interesting features is that their antennae protrude from quite far down on their face. In the background you can see a few of the cavities of the "bee hotel".'