Encouraged by the bold Robin at Mount Gate ...
... and several Blue Tits ...
... a Coal Tit came to my hand for the first time. They are crazy about pine nuts, and once they have taken the plunge they are unstoppable. It followed me for 200 yards as I went along the Flower Walk taking seven in all.
Here it is calling for service from the top of the corkscrew hazel bush.
The Coal Tit at the northwest corner of the bridge is also getting interested, observing the confident Great Tits getting all the pine nuts they want, and it will probably start coming down in a few days.
There's no problem with the familiar Chaffinch, who was waiting on the grass near the Serpentine Gallery. I try to avoid feeding him on the ground, which is generally unsafe because there might be a lurking rat, but he's very good at catching thrown pine nuts in midair.
The pussy willow tree near the bridge is attracting Buff-Tailed Bumblebees to its catkins ...
... and evidently other insects, because several Great Tits were leaping about in it. Probably bumblebees are large enough to be safe from them.
A Blackbird looked for worms under a crabapple tree in the Rose Garden.
The female Peregrine, not seen for a week, was on the barracks tower.
The old Grey Heron at the Henry Moore sculpture has also been out of sight for a while, but today he was back on his lookout post.
Another heron hunted in the reed bed east of the Lido, a good place because small fish lurk between the stems.
A Great Crested Grebe rested under the terrace of the Dell restaurant.
The female Mute Swan of the killer pair was preening on the nesting island. A Moorhen followed her example. Swans don't usually bother Moorhens, regarding them as insignificant ...
... but when a Coot sees one it makes a beeline for it to shoo it away.
Surprisingly, the single Egyptian gosling at the Lido is still alive.
The Common Pochard x Tufted hybrid drake was also at the Lido. He stays with a flock of Tufted Ducks, so probably his mother was one. Note the two-tone back -- pure Pochards have a single shade of grey here -- and the orange eye intermediate between the red eye of a Pochard and the yellow eye of a Tufted Duck.
Jesús Porras, Tinúviel's bird guide, shot this remarkable video in Extremadura, Spain: a panorama of 140 Great Bustards. It's slightly blurred by heat haze, but I wish I was somewhere warm enough to have a heat haze instead of shivering in a chilly English spring.
What a demanding little fellow, that Coal Tit. Instead of the cookie monster, it's the pine nut monster!
ReplyDeleteI wouldn't be too sure the Bumblebee is safe from the Great Tit. Nothing is safe from a Great Tit.
A small correction: the video was taken by Jesús Porras, not Emilio Pacios. The haze, by the way, was due to the amount of African dust clogging out the air! (thankfully the rain is clearing it out, because it was really oppressive).
Tinúviel
Sorry. I've corrected the blog and the YouTube channel. We even get African dust here sometimes. There was a big fall a couple of years ago and it took several days and quite a lot of rain to wash the red coating off roofs.
DeleteI’m glad you made a new friend with the Coal Tit Ralph!
ReplyDeleteSean
They were there when I went late Fri 22nd.
ReplyDelete