Not enough female ducks

The male Little Owl at the Round Pond, in his usual lime tree, was perhaps looking smug because he had parked his owlets in a place where I couldn't find them. I came back later and still had no luck.

He had also hidden them from the attention of a Magpie on the owls' nest tree with a hungry teenager begging next to it.

The male Little Owl at the Serpentine Gallery was calling loudly from a hornbeam tree as if something had annoyed him, but although I went round the tree several times I couldn't see him in the dense leaves. On the search I was accompanied by the usual male Chaffinch begging for pine nuts.

Not a good picture because there were twigs in the way. Full-size juvenile Blackcaps of both sexes have the same colours as adult females. This one at the northwest corner of the bridge seems to be a young one, as it still has a slightly fluffy look and its wing feathers are new and immaculate.

In the same place a young Great Tit stood on the handrail wondering whether it dared come to my hand for a pine nut. It did, and will now be a customer for life.

Ahmet Amerikali scored a remarkable treble by getting pictures of a Reed Warbler at the southwest corner of the bridge ...

... at the Italian Garden ...

... and at the east end of the Lido.

The chicks in the Grey Herons' nest on the island were hungry and pestering their parent. But it was the other parent, away fishing, that would return to feed them.

A Herring Gull and a Grey Heron swept over the Italian Garden side by side and flew down the Long Water. It wasn't a fight, more like a race. The gull won and the heron turned off into a tree.

It's hard to see how the Great Crested Grebes on the Serpentine are doing, as the lake is covered with geese and boats. But the pair at the island seem to have lost one of their two chicks. This one was waiting for a parent to return with a fish. I stayed for a few minutes and nothing happened. Perhaps the late cold spring has had an effect on the fish supply, though the older chick on the Long Water seems to be doing fine.

This Coot below the Italian Garden has a perfectly good nest already on which it has brought up chicks. But that doesn't stop it from working frantically on an unnecessary  second nest. Their nest building instinct is so strong that they simply can't stop.

A Greylag Goose on the Serpentine has already regrown its primaries after moulting. Most of the big geese here are still flightless.

The Egyptians on the Serpentine are down from ten to seven goslings after only a couple of days, sad but inevitable on a lake full of Herring Gulls.

But the Egyptians on the Round Pond had seven a month ago, and still do. Here they had seen someone who looked as if he might feed them, and were hurrying over: they were disappointed.

The difference in survival rates seems to depend entirely on gulls, or which there are only a few on the Round Pond, while there are lots of Carrion Crows in both places and of course the usual rampaging dogs.

A scene on the Long Water. Red-Crested Pochard drakes are bigger and flashier than Common Pochard drakes. In fact they are not closely related and belong to different genera, Netta rufina and Aythya ferina. They share a common name because of the their ginger heads. Pochard is a French word for a drunkard, and it seems that they were named for a fancied resemblance to a drunkard's red face.

There are six Red-Crested Pochards on the Long Water, all drakes. Common Pochards also have a badly skewed sex ratio, a problem so serious that a few years the BTO asked volunteers to count birds: I did the lake here and it was 8:1. But here are two of the drakes beside two female Gadwalls, a perfectly ordinary sight.

The Gadwalls here seem to have an almost equal number of males and females. I have been told that they have protected breeding sites in Buckingham Palace Gardens which save nesting females from being attacked by foxes, but don't know whether this is the case. I visited the gardens on an open day a few years ago, but you are restricted to a small area and don't see much.

A bronze fly perched on a leaf in the Rose Garden. It was in fact an ordinary Greenbottle. Apparently they turn bronze with age, and this one's frayed wings show that it's been around for a while.

Perhaps when Shakespeare wrote '... the small gilded fly / Does lecher in my sight' he had been looking at an elderly Greenbottle -- though not as old as King Lear, who made this remark in Act 4 Scene 6, driven mad by remorse.