Little owlet

A Little owlet has come out of the nest hole at the Round Pond. I could only find one in this horse chestnut tree.

Here it is calling and preening.

Its father was in the same tree keeping an eye on it.

It was a warm sunny day and a Blackbird was sunbathing in a flower bed in the Rose Garden.

A Magpie looked down from a red-leafed cherry tree at the northwest corner of the bridge.

A family of Greenfinches were bouncing about in the holly tree north of Peter Pan. I only got a picture of the male.

There was another family with chasing fledglings in a tree on the other side of the Long Water. I thought it was the local family of Blackcaps, and indeed this seems to be a Blackcap fledgling.

When I photographed this bird in the same place I thought it was an adult female Blackcap.  But it has too much of an eye stripe and looks like a warbler that has got mixed up in the general confusion. Later: The general opinion seems to be that it's a Chiffchaff.

Another puzzle with a bird family, this time Long-Tailed Tits in the Dell. This isn't a good photograph but it's clearly a young bird pulling something held in its spare foot to pieces. The thing doesn't look like any kind of larva I can think of.

The young Grey Heron from the second nest on the island was looking for small fish lurking under the concrete edge of the Serpentine and got two.

A Coot with chicks in a fountain pool in the Italian Garden had a faceoff with a heron that had landed on a planter and could easily have grabbed one of the chicks if it strayed too close. The heron yielded and flew off.

I was filming two pairs of Great Crested Grebes having a territorial dispute on the Serpentine when a saxophone and guitar duo started up on a bench behind me. Honestly I didn't dub a sound track on to this video -- you know I'd never do that.

The two pairs of Mute Swans with single cygnets on the Serpentine are guarding them carefully.

A Black-Tailed Skimmer dragonfly perched on a bramble at the southwest corner of the bridge. I think this is an immature male that has not yet got much of the powdery blue 'pruination' that it will get later, but I may well be wrong.

A male Common Blue Damselfly sunned itself on the railings at Peter Pan.

The electric charging stations at the boathouse on the Serpentine aren't for electric outboard motors for the powerboats as I had hoped (because that would have slowed the staff down from zooming about the lake at reckless speeds with 50 horsepower petrol outboards and raising a huge damaging wash). They're for ten new electric boats for hire.

These look like pedalos and may well be driven by a central paddle, though the extreme inefficiency of this method of propulsion would make for a terrible waste of electricity. This seems a missed opportunity. The new boat people ordered far too many rowing boats when they started, and twenty of these are moored and mouldering unused in the middle of the lake. If they wanted electric boats they could have bought some low-powered electric outboards with propeller guards and fitted them to the rowing boats, saving a lot of money. But the park management always think in terms of flashy new stuff and not of making use of what they have.