A Blackcap sang beside the Long Water.
There were two other male Blackcaps within a hundred yards of it.
Males are much more noticeable than females, partly because you hear them singing but I think females do tend to lurk more in the bushes. Also they are brown and better camouflaged.
There was a Dunnock in the woodland beside the lake ...
... and a Wren on the other side near Peter Pan.
A Willow Warbler sang near the bridge, but it was deep in the bushes and I couldn't see it, let alone get a picture.
A Song Thrush by the Italian Garden was carrying a worm to its nest, but it didn't want me to see it flying to the nest which would have given away its location. So it waited patiently on a branch until I finished filming it. As soon as my back was turned it flew off.
Another Song Thrush with a worm could be seen in a sweet chestnut tree by the leaf yard.
The No Swimming signs lining the Serpentine might have been designed as convenient perches for birds. Thanks to Geoffrey Hunt for this picture of a Carrion Crow calling its friends over.
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Coot nests are going up all round both lakes. This one is beside the Vista.
The Grey Heron with the red bill is still faithfully in its nest. I didn't hear any sound from the chick in the other nest, and still haven't managed to see it.
The Mute Swan nesting in the reeds near the Lido and a heron fishing on the edge ignored each other.
The dominant male on the Long Water has finally got his mate interested in the nesting island. He stood by proudly while she arranged twigs.
Two other males had a standoff farther own the lake, pointlessly as the dominant swans will chase them off as soon as they get around to it. The female is just as good at repelling intruders as the male, as she has been doing it for years.
A Hairy-Footed Flower Bee visited a patch of Red Deadnettles on Buck Hill.
In the Rose Garden, one of the familiar Mining Bees was enjoying a Poppy Anemome, rolling around in the pollen.
The equally familiar Dark-Edged Bee Fly was a few feet away on a clump of Ajuga reptans. It's hard to think of this comic-looking creature as a threat, but Conehead 54 tells me it's a parasitoid of Mining Bees. It lays its eggs in their holes and the hatching larvae eat first the food that the bee has provided for its grubs, and then the grubs themselves. No wonder the bee was attacking it in Thursday's video.
What is the cause of the Heron with the red bill??
ReplyDeleteSean
Breeding season.
DeleteBlackcaps have such an enormously cheering song. I enjoyed hearing the chiffchaff in the background going over its happy three-note song.
ReplyDeleteI do suspect birds know how to read. How else to explain their fondness for perching on the 'no swimming sign', especially Gulls, unless it be their desire to do a bit of trolling.
Tinúviel
The number of singing Blackcaps in the park seems to increase year by year. Apart from the constant screeching of the damned parakeets, which I try to edit out of videos, they and Chiffchaffs are the main sound at the moment. There are also more Song Thrushes than in previous years and they outnumber Blackbirds which used to be the commonest thrushes in the park. Anyway it's a rich soundscape.
DeleteActually bee flies have a slightly different life cycle than that http://soldierflies.brc.ac.uk/bee-flies "Bee-flies in the genus Bombylius lay their eggs into the nests of solitary mining bees. To do this (in at least some of the species) the adult females collect dust or sand at the tip of their abdomen, using it to coat their eggs, which helps protect the eggs from drying out. The female next proceeds to find areas of ground where solitary bees have made nest-burrows, hovering over the burrows to flick her egss into them (see video below).
ReplyDeleteThe bee-fly's larva hatches, crawls further into the bee burrows and waits for the bee's own larva to grow to almost full-size, at which point the bee-fly larva attacks the bee larva, feeding on its body fluids and eventually killing it. This is bad news for the bee of course, but bee-flies and bees have lived side-by-side for many millennia, and there is no evidence that bee-flies cause any major decline in bees.
For more detail on the bee-fly life-cycle see Louise Kulzer's account on the American "Scarabs" Bug Society, from which the above image of Bombylius larvae has been borrowed."
Thanks for the information.
Delete