A Robin in the Flower Walk has started to sing again after its summer break, still a bit quietly. It will sing all autumn and winter right through to next summer.
The Robin in the Rose Garden shrubbery came out for some pine nuts.
Encouraged by a slight drizzle, which brings up the worms, two young Blackbirds in the Dell started to forage around a rock.
Blackbirds were in evidence in the Flower Walk too, with a female in a flower bed ...
... a young one in the corkscrew hazel bush ...
... and another female on top of the bush (though it's possibly the same as the first one which had flown round while I was photographing the second).
Starlings clustered around some edible object in the Diana fountain enclosure.
A Jay effortlessly crushed a peanut with its powerful bill. It's odd that Carrion Crows, which are bigger and stronger, don't do this instead of laboriously pecking a hole in the shell.
A male Great Spotted Woodpecker flew into a tree in the leaf yard.
It was quite windy at the Round Pond and the female Little Owl was staying in her hole again, but she did obligingly come to the front to have her picture taken.
One of the young Grey Herons stood above the nest where its sibling was sulking as usual.
The posts in the Long Water where the tern raft was moored have become a favourite place for Cormorants.
The Coot on the new nest in the Italian Garden was looking very comfortable.
The Black Swan on the Serpentine took advantage of the drizzle to have a preen.
A fairly large pale bee landed on a ragwort on Buck Hill and stuck its antennae into the flower, apparently smelling it. It quickly flew away, revealing a dark tip to its abdomen. Conehead 54 thinks it's probably a faded Common Carder.
The Huntress fountain in the Rose Garden is finally working again. It had been restored at huge expense, including a large new upper bowl of multicoloured marble, and was finished last August. A soon as it was switched on it was apparent that the lower bowl was leaking slightly, with water trickling over the path. It only ran for a couple of weeks and then either went wrong or was turned off. It has been lying idle for eleven months and was only started again today.
The fountain, featuring the goddess Diana, was originally made for the garden of Sir Walter Palmer's house Frognal at Ascot in 1899. Evidently Lady Palmer thought it was improper, because as soon as he died she gave it to the park, where it was set up in 1906. The sculptor was Lady Feodora Gleichen, the first female member of the Royal British Society of Sculptors. The Art Nouveau style of the fountain is unusual in London, being much more of a French and German thing.
Fallen Purple Loosestrife petals added a touch of colour to a swirl of slime and algae in one of the Italian Garden pools.
That last picture looks like a picture of the surface of a strange planet taken by Hubble. Amazing.
ReplyDeleteWhat a strange name, Feodora. That's Russian for Theodora (like Fyodor for Theodore and Timofei for Timothy).
Tinúviel
Heaven knows where she got that Russian name. She was a very distant relative of the Romanovs, however. According to Wikipedia she was the eldest daughter of Prince Victor of Hohenlohe-Langenburg (a British naval officer and sculptor, and half-nephew of Queen Victoria) and his morganatic wife, Laura Seymour, a daughter of Admiral Sir George Seymour, a remote nephew of Henry VIII's Queen Jane Seymour.
DeleteYour bumblebee looks like a faded Common Carder Bee to me, Ralph.
ReplyDeleteThanks. Certainly the brief back view I got would accord with that.
DeleteHi Robin, I thoroughly enjoyed reading your blog. My favourite waterbird in Hyde Park is the Great crested Grebe and you have so many descriptions and photos. Enjoyed reading and watching video clips about all the other birds. Thank you!
ReplyDeleteThank you.
Delete