Song Thrush imitating a Blackcap

A Song Thrush singing quietly to himself beside the Long Water heard a Blackcap and did a good imitation of the song.

There are Wrens all around the Long Water, singing and chittering and dashing around in the bushes.

A Robin in the Flower Walk bathed in a puddle left by the morning rain.

Just along the path a Long-Tailed Tit was collecting insects for a nest hidden in the bushes.

A family portrait of the Grey Herons in the nest at the east end of the island. As usual with family portraits, the children refused to pose properly.

There's a third Coot nest in the Italian Garden, well hidden in irises in the northwest pool. I only spotted it because I saw one of them carrying a withered iris leaf to a planter.

The Moorhen nest at the Vista is hard to see, but usually they're so well hidden that you don't see them at all.

An aggressive male Mute Swan, probably 4FUK who is now the boss of the Serpentine in the killer's absence, deliberately descended next to another swan to frighten it.

This pair of a Canada Goose and a Canada x Greylag hybrid has been together for quite a while, and you often see them near the Triangle. There's no hope of goslings as the hybrid is sterile. A cross between two members of the Greylag genus Anser would be fertile -- as with the Bar-Headed x Greylag hybrids we sometimes see here -- but not one between Anser and the Canada genus Branta.

As the seven Egyptian goslings start to grow it's become apparent that they are from two different broods, with two of the older and bigger than the others. Egyptians are vague about whether offspring are their own and adopt easily.

The male Egyptian at the Henry Moore sculpture was alone again. It looks as if his mate is nesting once more after two unsuccessful attempts in past months.

The single Egyptian gosling at the Lido was on the jetty with its parents. So were the five Mallard ducklings.

The solitary Mandarin drake wandered along the shore.

A Mexican orange bush in the Flower Walk had three species of hoverfly in it. I've seen this one, Helophilus pendulus, known as the Sun Fly or the Footballer (because of its striped thorax), at Rainham Marshes but not before in the park.

There was also the very common Batman hoverfly Myathropa florea. The bat symbol on the thorax is not well marked in this one.

It was joined by a Tachina fera, which has no common name as far as I know.

Lastly, the problem of yesterday's caterpillars is solved. I looked at the tree they were in and it was a box tree. Also it was partly dead. From that it was easy to find that they were the caterpillars of the Box Tree Moth Cydalima perspectalis, which encloses parts of a tree in a web and eats all the leaves inside it. This is a picture from Wikipedia by Didier Descouens, released under a CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.

Moral: if you see an insect that's hard to identify, note the plant it's on.