A good year for Song Thrushes

A Song Thrush sang cheerfully on a branch near the leaf yard. You can also hear a Blackbird and a Chaffinch in the background.

There were five singing male Song Thrushes within a hundred yards of each other. Here's another one. It's been a very good year for them, but there are very few Mistle Thrushes.

A Greenfinch perched in a dead hawthorn tree near the Henry Moore sculpture.

A Jackdaw stared down from an oak branch, expecting to be fed.

So did a Great Tit clinging to a plane trunk.

A banging noise from a tree near the Speke obelisk turned out to be two Stock Doves fighting.

The Grey Heron with the red bill was back in the nest again. I no longer have much expectation that the pair are serious about nesting.

Four Great Crested Grebes were in a loose formation on the Serpentine, a sign that they are newly arrived and haven't yet started looking for territories.

The Mute Swans' nest on the island is out of sight from the shore, so you don't know what's going to emerge. It turned out to be four new cygnets. Their mother took them for a brief excursion, then back to land.

Sad to say, the swans on the Long Water have lost two of their four cygnets, for no apparent reason. Did their mother hope another egg would hatch and delay too long in taking them on to the water to feed? She's an experienced mother and would be unlikely to make such a mistake.

But the six on the Serpentine were in fine form.

One of them flapped its tiny wings. It's going to be a long time before these will bear it aloft.

The Black Swan was at the east end of the Serpentine cruising with his new girlfriend.

The broods of eleven Egyptian goslings ...

... and seven are miraculously intact and now growing fast.

A Holly Blue butterfly at the bridge stubbornly refused to show off its wings.

Yellow roses in the Rose Garden were full of Honeybees.

Nick Abalov got an excellent picture of a male Broad-Bodied Chaser dragonfly in the allotment.