It's started raining at last as I write this.
A flock of Long-Tailed Tits were crowded into a lime tree looking for aphids.
A Little owlet near the Round Pond looked down sleepily from its hole.
Its mother was in the next tree.
She passed the time by preening.
The female Peregrine was on the barracks tower.
Neil photographed a Hobby circling over the north of the Kensington Gardens. They seem to have nested outside the park this year.
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A young Black-Headed Gull played with a twig.
Three Cormorants perched side by side on the raft on the Long Water.
A young one with a white front perched on a post at Peter Pan.
Yesterday Neil found a Little Grebe on the Long Water. It was in non-breeding plumage, either because it's changed already or because it's a teenager just out of the stripy juvenile stage.
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I looked for it today but couldn't find it.
The Coots under the marble fountain in the Italian Garden are beginning to rebuild their abandoned nest.
One of them took time off to have a shower.
A Mallard has brought out another six ducklings, and was occupying the Coot nest near the bridge until they decided to set out on their own and had to be followed.
This is one of the three dark Mallard drakes. It's in eclipse but doesn't look much different in breeding plumage, unlike normal drakes which look completely female apart from having a yellow bill.
Another picture by Neil, a male Common Darter dragonfly beside the Long Water. (At least I think it's a Common Darter -- there is a reddish sheen on the wings but I can't see the red veins of a Red-Veined Darter.)
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No doubt about this male Black-Tailed Skimmer on the railings in the Flower Walk.
Honeybees browsed on gaudy helenium flowers.
That's a Hobby circling.
ReplyDeleteThanks. Now I look closely, I can just see its red underpants.
DeleteGreat to see that it started to rain. If England's green and pleasant lands should become yellow and parched then that must be a sign that the apocalypse is upon us.
ReplyDeleteTinúviel
This drought was not nearly as severe as the one of 1976, which went on for several months, and even that was dwarfed by the great European drought of 1921. Climate fetishists ignore such inconvenient facts. More rain forecast for tomorrow.
DeleteSadly no rain here yet, but hopefully later today?
ReplyDeleteGood to see the Hobby. I've definitely seen far fewer this year & believe numbers are down.
Agree a Common Darter.
The Hobby -- or Hobbies if it's the usual pair -- seems to be staying north of Kensington Gardens this year. I've several times heard calls from Notting Hill and Bayswater.
DeleteFurther to my recent comment on starlings: went to the Round Pond yesterday and found a flock of around 60 looking for food (how typical!). Noticed the juveniles were bashing the parents out of the way to get food - some things never change :)
ReplyDeleteThe Starlings understand about human mealtimes and fly from the Round Pond down to the lakeside restaurants. It's always the same flock we see.
DeletePS and regarding the weather: have read a few poems by the author Ambrose Bierce over time, and one of them very-neatly satirised the 'art' of weather forecasting. If people have been laughing at the meteorologists since the 1800's, it's a puzzle how so many in the modern age are accepting forecasts dated as far ahead as 2050 as fact :(
ReplyDeleteOnce I dipt into the future far as human eye could see,
DeleteAnd I saw the Chief Forecaster, dead as any one can be --
Dead and damned and shut in Hades as a liar from his birth,
With a record of unreason seldom paralleled on earth.
While I looked he reared him solemnly, that incandescent youth,
From the coals that he'd preferred to the advantages of truth.
He cast his eyes about him and above him; then he wrote
On a slab of thin asbestos what I venture here to quote --
For I read it in the rose-light of the everlasting glow:
'Cloudy; variable winds, with local showers; cooler; snow.'