Heron chick out of the nest

One of the Grey Heron chicks on the island had climbed out of the nest and was on a branch above. Its wings are now fully developed but it may not have used them in getting up, as they are good climbers.

The third chick was behind a hawthorn branch on the right of the picture, only faintly visible here. If all goes well the three chicks should be climbing around actively for several days before they take the plunge and fly out -- but remember the last nest, where one of the chicks huddled in the nest for weeks before it dared to emerge.

A heron under the parapet of the Italian Garden lunged, came up with a tangle of weed ...

... and extracted a small perch.

A Cormorant drying its wings on a post by the Serpentine island was speeding up the process by flapping continuously.

Two of the Great Crested Grebe chicks passed each other going opposite ways.

The family on the Long Water had got mixed up with the Mute Swan family.

Although the aggressive male swan pecks at ducks, I think he has the sense to leave grebes alone. If he were to annoy one it would dive, whizz towards the swan under water, and deliver a painful peck to his foot.

A Wood Pigeon was lurching around in a buckthorn tree at Mount Gate trying to eat the fruit, most of which had already gone.

While I was photographing it, several Great Tits came out for pine nuts ...

... followed by a Coal Tit ...

... and one of a pair of Robins that nested here earlier in the year.

The male Little Owl at the Round Pond, not seen for a while, appeared in the horse chestnut tree where his mate is usually found.

Tom was at Rainham Marshes and got a picture of a Pied Flycatcher.

It doesn't look particularly pied, but it's a female and they are less strongly marked than the males which are dark brown and white.

There's a wasp nest in a hole in the ground in the Triangle shrubbery. Wasps were climbing all over the leaves of a small euonymus bush. When you look higher, you see that there were more on the leaves of a willow above the bush, and these leaves are infested with aphids. The insects secrete honeydew, a sugary liquid, which has also dripped on to the bush below, and it's this that has attracted the wasps.

A small bee, I think an Andrena mining bee species, browsed on a daisy in a planter in the Italian Garden.

A Willow Emerald damselfly rested on a bramble by the bridge.

I had supposed that this figure on the Albert Memorial was Urania the Muse of Astronomy, who is represented as holding a celestial globe. But the sunlight picked out the word GEOLOGY on the base. There's no Muse of Geology, though there ought to be. The globe she is holding is a terrestrial one, and she rests her right foot on the skull of a fossil.

My friend Dr John Cosgrove, a geologist at Imperial College just down the road from here, is writing a book which will be the definitive work on the memorial, a long task which won't be finished for a couple of years yet. It deals with the history and the very complicated iconography of the memorial, but the geology is also fascinating. Not only does the structure incorporate a large variety or ornamental stones, it's also built in an odd place exactly on the edge of one of the ancient flood plains of the Thames formed at the end of the last Ice Age when the huge river was carrying away water from the melting glaciers. This required complicated and very large foundations, and the memorial rests on a system of massive brick vaults considerably taller on the downhill side.