A Coal Tit in a yellow ginkgo tree in the Flower Walk ...
... spun round in fright as a Chaffinch landed behind at ...
... and left it in possession of the twig.
Also in the Flower Walk, a Blue Tit looked out from an aucuba bush ...
... and a Robin perched in a small beech.
Long-Tailed Tits gathered in a bush at the edge of the Vista before the flock crossed the gap together.
A Dunnock came out of the bushes at Mound Gate. You think of Dunnocks as being stripy birds, but from this angle the stripes hardly show at all.
A male Blackbird ate sloes in a bush beside the Lido ...
... while his mate perched on a twig above. I hope he let her come down to enjoy the feast.
When you think of how fantastically shy the Jackdaws were when they returned to the park in 2014, it seems incredible that now they walk confidently up to you to demand peanuts.
Jays also make their wishes felt very clearly.
A young Herring Gull fished up an algae-coated stone from the shallows at the edge of the Serpentine.
A Grey Heron perched on a rail in the Italian Garden with the Mute Swan pair visible in the pool behind.
A Cormorant had been fishing in another pool. Not finding anything, it decided to leave. There were few people here on a misty grey day, so it strolled across the pavement and jumped down the steps of the marble fountain ...
... where another Cormorant had just caught a perch under the edge of the fountain bowl.
A male Egyptian Goose on Buck Hill caressed his mate and panted hoarsely. Although the sexes look alike they make completely different sounds: females quack.
You showed a while ago a horse chestnut that had grown new leaf and before that another horse chestnut that had responded to the stress of drought by over-producing conkers. Recently I’ve noticed ever more horse chestnuts producing new leaf, several yesterday along the path that has a line of sweet chestnut on the opposite side and today several more just north of the Round Pond. As far as I can see no other species have responded to the drought and the mild autumn in the same way, but as you point out, no other species had the leaf miner to double the stress. Have you ever seen this phenomenon before? Or how it develops?
ReplyDeleteLater I had the pleasure of seeing a black-headed gull doing the worm dance at the Triangle car park behind the bench. It's thanks to your blog that I realised what it was doing. What a dainty action!
No, I've never seen horse chestnuts do this before. And the great drought of 1976 was before the arrival of the leaf miner moth, so there wasn't the double stress that these have undergone.
DeleteI've seen Black-Headed Gulls doing the worm dance, though not very often, and wondered whether these smallish birds can patter strongly enough to bring up worms. Next time I see one I will film it and see what comes up.