It looks as if we are at peak Egyptian in the park with no fewer than 47 goslings. No wonder the ancient Egyptian hieroglyph for 'son of' is one of these amazingly prolific creatures. This example is from the name of Pharaoh Seti I, and the two signs on the right mean 'son of the Sun', a customary title of pharaohs.
From Deutsches Museum, Munich. Picture by Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin, CC BY-SA 4.0.
At the risk of being boring I will put up pictures of all of them.
There are two families at the Round Pond with 10 ...
... and 9 goslings.
The pair at the Henry Moore sculpture have 7.
On the Serpentine there are broods of 11 ...
7 ...
... and 3.
They are doing considerably better than the big geese at keeping their young from the attentions of gulls, crows and foxes. The Greylags at the Lido are down to 4 goslings between the two pairs, though the Canadas are holding on to 3.
Even the Mallards, which usually lose all their ducklings with a couple of days, still have 5.
The male Mute Swan visited his mate on the nest at the Lido, then enjoyed a silly game with a stick, picking it up and throwing it down to make a splash. This amused him for several minutes.
This is the first young Long-Tailed Tit I've seen this year, from the nest by the bridge.
The Great Tits are a bit behind, but there's a nest in an old pump with nestlings already hatched. A parent visited it.
The Blackbirds near the Speke obelisk also have young to feed.
Another Blackbird sang in a tree by the leaf yard. The yard is full of noisy machinery making compost from dead leaves, but I manged to get two short clips with a reasonably quiet background.
A female Magpie in the Rose Garden squawked and fluttered her wings in a vain effort to get him to give her the peanut he had just taken. He wouldn't, but I gave her a peanut for herself.
A Grey Heron on the Serpentine island struggled to break off twigs to add to a new nest. This isn't one of the pair with chicks, whose double nest is partly in the same tree but higher.
The female Coot at the bridge's two mates may or may not account for the huge number of eggs she has laid, 13, which she can barely cover sitting in the nest. The males squabble for the privilege of bring her bits of leaf and grass to line the nest. At the beginning of the video you can see the three Canada goslings.
The Moorhens in the Dell seem to be starting a nest on a rock under the small waterfall. Note the huge number of midges.
There wasn't enough sunshine to bring out many insects, but a Buff-Tailed Bumblebee was busy on the ceanothus in the Rose Garden.
What a great example of Coots' version of tug-of-war! They never fail to do something interesting.
ReplyDeleteI didn't know large sulky male swans had it in them to play with sticks or anything else. 'Playful' isn't exactly the sort of adjective I'd associate with them.
Nothing boring about 47 pretty, pretty goslings!
Tinúviel
I've never seen a swan playing before, least of all an adult and a particularly large and violent male. But he can only have been doing that, picking up this bit of wood and deliberately throwing it down. It was too large to use in the nest and he made no attempt to bring it in.
Delete