Restless Little Owl

It was a windy day, especially at the Round Pond which is at the top of a hill. As I looked from a distance with binoculars I could see the male Little Owl jumping restlessly from branch to branch as he tried to find a comfortable perch where leaves wouldn't blow in his face. These four pictures were taken within five minutes.

Eventually he found a fairly sheltered place and he settled down to have a preen.

There were Sand Martins over the Round Pond again. Yesterday Joe Downing took these brilliant pictures of them. In the second one an adult is giving an insect to a youngster with a dexterity that would make an in-flight refuelling pilot green with envy.

They can't have nested in the park as no one has made a sand bank for them to nest in, so they must have come from one of the reserves farther out from the centre.

However, there was an encouraging sign: a brand new Blue Tit nest box in the woodland across the path from the Buck Hill shelter.

There hasn't been a new one for 30 years. It's a sign that our new Wildlife Officer, Nick Burnham, is taking his job seriously. Maybe he could organise a sand bank to replace the unused Kingfisher nest holes behind the gravel bank on the Long Water. But I haven't managed to meet him yet.

You often hear the 'chick, chick' call of a Great Spotted Woodpecker, but in summer they're often invisible in the leaves. This one was near the Henry Moore sculpture.

Wrens were making a loud fuss in several places. This one was in the Dell ...

... and there was a family near Peter Pan. Here is a young one.

The young Reed Warblers near the Italian Garden were chasing their parents through the reeds. This one was demanding to be fed.

The parakeet feeders at the foot of Buck Hill are getting well established, and someone has been hanging up blocks of fat and seeds in the trees.

This will probably lead to another crackdown by the park staff.

The pigeon-eating Lesser Black-Backed Gull had struck again, and a young gull was pulling at the pathetic scraps he had left.

The Great Crested Grebe chicks at the bridge are growing fast. They waited impatiently with their father while their mother looked for a fish for them, but eventually she turned up. I've left the volume of this recording on the bridge at its original level so that you can hear the piping calls of the chicks amid the traffic noise.

The other pair have divided the four chicks two and two, and both parents are fishing for them. A chick got a fish.

The female Mute Swan of the pair that have invaded the Long Water confidently led her five cygnets up from the bridge to the Vista, without feeling the need to be escorted by her fearsome mate.

When she was there she terrified a dog that some silly person had encouraged to jump into the lake, and her cygnets hissed beside her.

The Black Swan, in his usual place at the east end of the Serpentine, investigated a supermarket trolley that a vandal had thrown into the water. Swans like submerged objects, as snails cluster on them and can be picked off and eaten. But this hadn't been in the lake long enough, so the disappointed swan cruised off.