The adaptation of chillis

The Rose Garden is crowded with Robins, and this one singing in a rose bush had rivals to left and right.

It came down for a performance fee of several pine nuts.

The Chaffinch also arrived for his daily offering.

We've seen this pure white Feral Pigeon here before.

At Mount Gate it was a surprise to find a Jay and a Robin waiting side by side on the railings.

You tend to think of Great Tits as fairly sedentary: you meet the same ones every day in the same places. But this one at the Lido, where I've never fed a Great Tit before, evidently knew me from elsewhere, and called from a bush and came to my hand.

The Little Owl at the Round Pond was on one of her usual perches. The leaves are going to fall from the horse chestnut tree soon, and then sadly we'll see less of her when she has no cover and spends the day in her hole.

You can tell that the Peregrines are away from the tower by the sight of Carrion Crows playing around the aerials.

Again there was an adult Grey Heron in the newest nest on the island, probably a parent of the three young ones which have now left the nest for good to cope with the challenge of independence.

Someone had thrown a chilli to a Black-Headed Gull on the Serpentine, probably intending to give it a cruel surprise. But chillis don't taste hot to birds, only to mammals. This is a nifty bit of evolution. The chilli seeds can pass through a bird's quick digestive system undamaged and germinate when the bird drops them at a distance, spreading the plant. The more thorough digestion of a mammal would damage the seeds and make them infertile. So to a bird a ripe chilli is a palatable sweet red fruit. To a mammal, which can't even see red, it's a grey thing with a horrible taste and is left uneaten.

(However, tomato seeds, which are larger, seem to survive the human gut sometimes, as shown by the tomato plants that come up at sewage farms.)

A pair of Great Crested Grebes rested side by side on the Serpentine, looking like comfy bedroom slippers.

But it's still constant action on the Long Water, with one young grebe chasing each parent.

At least the young ones are beginning to try to fish by themselves, probably still with little success.

Someone at the Vista had been trying to feed bits of apple to the Mute Swan family, who didn't like them. But a Moorhen happily seized a chunk and hurried off to eat it under a bush.

A Cormorant flew up the Long Water.

Some fragile little mushrooms had come up in the leaf litter under an old chestnut tree. They are of the coprinoid family, mushrooms which spread their spores by dissolving into a goo. There are many species, a lot of them looking much like this. Mario explained to me that they used to be assigned to the genus Coprinus, but it was discovered that they weren't all closely related and now they have been split into Coprinus, Coprinellus, Coprinopsis and Parasola, the last of which includes P. plicatilis, the Little Japanese Umbrella mushroom often seen in the park.

The enormous crane used to clean the windows on the ugly block of flats pompously called One Hyde Park really does look rather like a huge version of the bird it is named after.