A large brood of Long-Tailed Tits, perhaps more than one family, were dashing around and squeaking in the trees at Peter Pan. Here are two of the young ones.
Their parents were hard at work catching insects for them.
The young in the nest in the Rose Garden haven't emerged yet, but their parents are just as busy.
Blue Tits are nesting in a lamp post at the bottom end of the Triangle car park. Several of the gas lamps in Hyde Park are used in this way every year.
A Starling flew in and out of a nest in the eaves of the Buck Hill shelter to feed its chicks, which you can hear begging frantically. The open eaves were blocked up with planks to stop the birds from nesting there, but the agile Starlings simply climb around the obstacles.
An adult on the path below was busy collecting insects.
A Jackdaw waited for a peanut in the motheaten box tree at the bridge.
The Little Owl at the Round Pond stayed on her shady branch in the middle of the lime tree all day. With the leaves fully out she is very hard to see, let alone photograph, and this is the best I could manage.
Three Cormorants perched on the fallen poplar at the Vista.
There is a new Moorhen family on the Long Water under the edge of the Italian Garden. The four chicks are being fed by the parents, but also browsing on algae themselves.
The Coot nest on the wire baskets at the bridge hasn't hatched yet. A parent was turning the eggs.
That nest is firmly anchored to some twigs that are sticking out of the basket. But there's a new one at the other end of the bridge and it doesn't look firmly anchored at all, bobbing in the waves. However, Coots are skilled nest builders and they have probably managed to fix it by sticking twigs into the basket from above.
The single Egyptian gosling on the south side of the Serpentine had been taken across the lake by its parents and was by the island, where it was attacked by a young Herring Gull.
But it's now too big to be grabbed, and later I found it back on the usual shore preening calmly as if nothing had happened.
A Brimstone butterfly visited a vetch flower on Buck Hill.
It's almost larger than the gull. What was the gull thinking?
ReplyDeleteCould anything be sweeter than those Long Tailed Tit young?
Tinúviel
Young gulls do seem to be pointlessly aggressive. When they grow up they at least target their violence.
DeleteSpeaking of sweet little birds, the first baby Robin has been sighted.
And by the way, I went to sniff the allegedly foetid rose. It smelt quite rose-like to my feeble olfactory organs. So I asked a couple of women passing by what they thought, and they said it was different but perfectly pleasant. So maybe the person who named it had a nose even more out of joint than mine.