A faint hint of summer

It was a bit warmer and sunnier today, and about time too. A flock of Long-Tailed Tits and Blue Tits swept through the trees in the Rose Garden. A Blue Tit fledgling paused in a treetop for long enough to have its picture taken.

This young Great Tit in the Flower Walk was already looking for its own food, probing the bark on a branch.

Chiffchaffs called to each other near the Henry Moore sculpture.

A Starling wandered through the long grass looking for insects. Birds which walk, putting one foot in front of the other, can move through long grass more easily than birds which hop, such as thrushes.

A Carrion Crow had won a bit of chicken from a table at the Dell restaurant.

The female Little Owl at the Serpentine Gallery was hard to find in a small lime tree next to the sweet chestnut where the pair have their nest hole.

The male Little Owl at the Round Pond was much easier to see in his usual lime tree.

A young Grey Heron preened on a post at the Serpentine island. This is one of the young ones from the first brood this year, hatched in January. It's now beginning to get its adult black and white head.

Two herons chased each other up the Long Water.

Another had taken over the Coots' nest on the fallen horse chestnut tree to use as a fishing platform.

When a heron does that, there's not much Coots can do about it. So they moved down to Peter Pan and worked off their irritation by fighting the resident pair. It was a fairly mild fight by Coot standards: brief flurries interspersed with threat displays. When they're serious about fighting they try to kill each other.

The resident pair's chicks are now full-size teenagers.

A Great Crested Grebe was fishing under the bridge. This is the male of the pair that have been hanging around the willow tree with a view to evicting the Coot nesting there.

The Black Swan was beside the Dell restaurant touting for food.

The park management, who are going mad on notices, have now painted No Feeding signs all over the pavement here. Of course no one pays any attention to them.

The Greylag goslings are growing their flight feathers and should be making their first experimental hops soon.

At the back of the Lido a Buff-Tailed Bumblebee investigated a mallow flower.

A titbit: the French for mallow is mauve. This became the name of a colour in 1859, in England, when it was given to the purple synthetic dye accidentally invented by William Henry Perkin three years earlier when he was a chemistry student aged 16, trying to synthesise quinine. It was the first synthetic dye and its strong fast colour made it hugely popular.

The eryngium patch east of the Lido is coming into flower, attracting some Honeybees.

I've been looking for more obscure and interesting bees but haven't found any in this terrible year for flying insects. Hoverflies are also severely down, and I could only find a Batman Hoverfly on an oxeye daisy.