Searching for insects

Poplar trees on the south shore of the Serpentine were loud with several families of tits. A Blue Tit headed for an insect-damaged leaf to see if there were any larvae still on it ...

... while a young one waited expectantly on a twig.

Great Tit fledglings chased their parents through a flowering Grevillea bush at the Lido.

A Chiffchaff flitted around in the dead hawthorn tree near the Henry Moore sculpture. Dead or alive, hawthorns seem to have a large insect population and attract small insect-eating birds of many species.

A Robin perched in the corkscrew hazel bush in the Flower Walk, another favourite place for small songbirds and it also contained various tits and a female Chaffinch.

But I missed the usual birds at Mount Gate and there was just a Wren looking down seriously from a branch.

The male Little Owl at the Round Pond is the master of the serious stare.

I didn't see a Little Owl at the Serpentine Gallery. It seems surprising that they are still using the sweet chestnut tree, where the female was calling yesterday, as the Carrion Crows' nest in it is still active.

There are now Great Crested Grebes nesting at both ends of the island, and they had a mild confrontation at the invisible frontier halfway along it. Neither nest is visible from the shore.

Six Coot chicks can now be seen on the Mute Swans' nesting island in the Long Water.

A young Mute Swan tried to work its way up the pecking order by defying one of the dominant males, 4FYG from the island, and even staged a brief attack. But you don't displace an established boss swan so easily, and it had to yield in the end.

The odd couple of the Canada Goose and Canada x Greylag hybrid were at the Triangle. This hybrid is not one of the three I photographed on the 23rd, so there are four here at present. This couple have been together for several years and are permanent residents, but the three are new arrivals and have come to moult on the lake.

The Egyptian Goose with two very small chicks fended off a Coot. This was unfair, as the Egyptian was standing on a nest that the Coot had built in a silly place on the edge of the Serpentine, and the Coot just wanted to go home.

I was taking a routine picture of a Large White butterfly and a fly on an oxeye daisy near the Vista ...

... when I noticed an odd protrusion in the middle of one of the flowers. Some outer petals had come up in the middle of the flower. Luckily at that point I met two other wildlife photographers, and we worked out that the odd growth was caused by some small shield bugs, which had presumably distorted the flower by laying eggs in it, and several adults were now clustered at the spot.

There was also a Thick-Legged Flower Beetle on another daisy.