A time to dance?

You don't expect Great Crested Grebes to dance in November. The western pair on the Serpentine were displaying, as they often do, but they seemed more enthusiastic than usual.

Then they both dived, so I started filming.

Cormorants on the posts at the Serpentine island gently agitated their wings to help them dry.

When a pair of Egyptian Geese encounters another, there's usually shouting. They are ridiculously territorial.

These were at the Huntress fountain in the Rose Garden. You'll notice that it's broken again. It has only worked for a few weeks since its expensive restoration last year. There are five sets of fountains with a water supply in the park, plus the waterfall in the Dell which is fed by an electric pump. Of these six only two are working, the Italian Garden fountains and the Diana fountain.

Pigeon Eater was on the water looking for his next victim, and his rival had taken the opportunity to steal his place on the Dell restaurant roof. I haven't seen these two in conflict yet, but it must occur.

This Black-Headed Gull was ringed by the North Thames Gull Group. Usually these gulls have a very unexciting history of flying between the Pitsea landfill site and the park, but this one has quite an early metal ring, EM38398, so it may have been somewhere more interesting. I've reported it to see if it has.

By the way, I still haven't heard from the ringer of the Danish gull I saw a few days ago. That's because the colour ring site cr-birding.org isn't working properly at the moment and won't accept full details, so I had to report it by the very slow Euring metal ring site app.bto.org/euring . The first of these allows you to contact the ringer directly and you usually get a reply within a day. The second doesn't, and your application grinds slowly through the clogged wheels of bureaucracy. However, I have now managed to make the colour ringing site work after a fashion by not giving full details and then looking at a list, so if I don't hear soon I'll write to the ringer myself.

The Little Owl at the Round Pond came out into her tree in spite of the dank and misty morning.

A female Pied Wagtail high-stepped through the wet grass below.

The female Chaffinch in the Rose Garden is getting bolder, and came out on to the path for several pine nuts.

The male Chaffinch who almost always finds me in Kensington Gardens was at Mount Gate, and came out for his daily treat.

He was accompanied by a Coal Tit, which came to my hand twice ...

... a Blue Tit, which also came down ...

... a Robin, one of a pair here ...

... and a Jay.

A Jackdaw waited on the railings of the Diana fountain.

Yesterday I said that there were no more bees on the Bog Sage by these railings. I was wrong: today there were two hardy Buff-Tailed Bumblebees.

There are still some other flowers for them just along the path behind the Big Bird statue.

But this place doesn't have year-round flowers like the Rose Garden, where I have photographed Buff-Tails in every month of the year.

Duncan Campbell found yet another kind of bracket fungus in the North Flower Walk. I'm pretty sure it's a Common Mazegill, Datronia mollis, a fungus which has a very varied appearance as it grows and ages.