A visit to Brompton Cemetery

There are going to be even more owls than usual in this post. I hope you don't mind.

Neil may have found a third Little Owl family. Early this morning he saw a young owl some distance to the south of the Round Pond, and it was a teenager looking older than those at the usual places near the Round Pond and the Serpentine Gallery.

Later he went back to the same tree and found an adult male. Both seemed nervous about being photographed, unlike the owls we know which are pretty used to it by now.

If it were not for the presence of the teenager I'd have guessed that the adult was the male from the Serpentine Gallery family, hardly ever seen near the nest tree. It was only a few hundred yards from the gallery. But I don't think it can be.

The Round Pond male was in a tree he often uses close by the nest tree ...

... and the Serpentine Gallery female was on one of her favourite branches.

A remarkable sequence of pictures taken by Tony Chua in the early morning shows one of the owlets at the Round Pond being fed with a beetle on the dead tree with the nest hole.

Apart from owls there wasn't much interesting bird life on view, as the small birds were sheltering from the hot sunlight. One of the Robins in the leaf yard came out to take a pine nut.

The water in the Italian Garden pools must be pretty thoroughly oxygenated by the fountains, and is passed through a cooler as it's recirculated. But even so, on a hot day the oxygen level falls and the carp come up near the surface to breathe more easily.

A Red-Eyed Damselfly on a patch of algae polished its eyes with its front feet. There were both Red-Eyed and Small Red-Eyed Damselflies here and they can be tricky to distinguish, but the pattern of blue on this one seems to indicate the former.

And this pair seem to be Small. The male was grasping the female in preparation for mating.

Nick Abalov got a fine picture of a Meadow Brown butterfly in flight.

It was the annual Open Day at Brompton Cemetery, and as usual Falconry UK had brought over some of their birds. These included a charming little Ferruginous Pygmy Owl (Glaucidium brasilianum, from South America) ...

... a White-Faced Owl (Ptilopsis leucotis, an African species) with gorgeous orange eyes ...

... and a young Mottled Owl (Strix virgata, native to Central and South America) still with some juvenile down on its head. When it grows up it will have similar markings to its English cousin the Tawny Owl, but with a more ginger tinge.

Falconry UK's web site declares the enterprise to be '100% corvid safe.' A Carrion Crow on a gravestone was very pleased to hear this.

On another stone, a squirrel was eating a flower it had impiously stolen from someone's grave.

Often you can see a lot of Goldfinches in Brompton Cemetery, but the only ones I saw today were on a television aerial in the street ...

... and the only Blackbird I found was on the sign of a pub in the Earl's Court Road where I stopped for a pint on the way home. I wonder why its nest is shown as full of gold coins.