Song Thrush in a yew

Autumn colours are appearing  around the Long Water. There's never much of a show in the mild English climate, unlike in New England where poor soil and freezing nights push the trees into frenzies of red and yellow.

A Song Thrush was feeding on the fruit in a yew tree near Peter Pan.

A Rose-Ringed Parakeet in the same tree tree chewed the red aril of a yew fruit to extract a few drops of juice, then spat it out and grabbed another. This typically wasteful way of feeding is of no use to the tree, which relies on a bird to eat the whole thing and pass out the undigested hard seed in its droppings at a distance where it can germinate usefully.

A Starling at the Lido restaurant had seized a chip, their favourite snack except perhaps for chocolate cake.

The faithful Chaffinch was waiting at the gate of the Flower Walk for his daily treat of pine nuts.

Inside the Flower Walk, the Robin on the north side ...

... and the one on the south side were glaring and nattering at each other and had a brief spat in the middle of the path. The south Robin is now missing some feathers on the right side of its neck, so it looks as if they've had a serious fight.

The Little Owl at the Round Pond looked down from the top of the horse chestnut tree.

Pigeon Eater was on the Dell restaurant roof looking bored.

It wasn't a particularly warm day but a Cormorant on a post at Peter Pan seemed to be feeling hot and was panting to cool down.

One of the Great Crested Grebe chicks on the Serpentine was fishing by itself. They are beginning to lose their juvenile stripes.

The Tufted drakes, always the last ducks to come out of eclipse, are beginning to get their white sides again.

But a group of Egyptian Geese on the Serpentine, way out of sync with the northern seasons as they often are, are still in the middle of moulting their wing feathers. Some Egyptians did it in June along with the big geese.

An aged Buff-Tailed Bumblebee tried to climb up a plant, gives up, took off and fell in the lake. I fished it out and put it on a flower to dry. I don't think it will have lived for much longer but at least it had somewhere comfortable to die.

In the Rose Garden with its year-round flowers bumblebees often live through the winter. This one was in a patch of withered plumbago, but was much more interested in an arbutus flower that had fallen into the middle.

Then it flew down to work over more fallen flowers on the ground.

A Speckled Wood butterfly perched on a Mexican orange leaf.

A beetle ran across the pavement in the Italian Garden. I think it's a Strawberry Seed Beetle, Harpalus rufipes.