Yet another grebe family on the Serpentine

It turns out that there are four Great Crested Grebe families on the Serpentine, one more than I thought. They were all busy out on the lake and I couldn't resist filming all of them.

These are the ones from the easily viewed nest at the east end of the island, now out on the lake with their parents fishing under moored rowing boats.

These were at the west side of the island, with their father bringing one of the chicks a small water creature. The chicks are already diving but not staying down for long. I don't know where they nested, though clearly it was on the island.

These were on the south shore of the lake, well away from the island, but I think this is the family from the nest halfway along the island, as the two chicks are older and larger than any of the others. One of them got a fish.

These are from the nest under the Dell restaurant balcony. I could only see one chick, but I think there are two and the other was hidden under its parent's wings. The chick was offered a fish, but this was slightly too large for it to manage.

A Greylag Goose was pecking at the empty nest, which caused a moment of alarm before I found the grebes at the other corner of the lake.

I couldn't see what was going on at the nest under the willow on the Long Water. If the sitting grebe turns its back it more or less disappears. We know that there is at least one chick, but will just have to wait till they come out on to the water -- and even then they may stay out of sight under the tree.

A Moorhen had a preen and a stretch on the edge at the Vista.

A Mute Swan was attacking some others at the east end of the Serpentine. At first sight I thought it was the killer male come over from the Long Water to cause mayhem, but it turned out to be the mother of the lone cygnet having an episode of maternal solicitude. You can see the cygnet in the background.

There was another Greylag with a white face here. It looks very like the one seen earlier of the Round Pond, but its pattern is slightly different. They may be siblings.

An Egyptian Goose was preening, showing off its fine iridescent green secondaries.

A Black-Headed Gull hurried to eat a bread crust before another gull nabbed it.

It was quite warm, and a Grey Heron was keeping in the shade of a charging post on the electric boat platform.

A Cormorant jumped on to a post at the island.

The Bank Holiday crowds kept most of the small birds from appearing, but the faithful tatty Robin at Mount Gate came out for some pine nuts.

A Jackdaw was waiting on a fallen tree by the Round Pond.

Duncan Campbell photographed a squirrel eating the fruit in a yew tree. The red outside of a yew fruit is sweet and edible but the seed inside contains poisonous taxol. Birds can eat the whole thing without ill effects as the seed passes through their quick digestive system without time for the poison to seep out, and indeed this is how the tree distributes its seeds. But I think that squirrels chew off the outside and discard the seeds, as in an old video of mine here. Duncan thinks that this squirrel was actually eating the seeds. This needs more observation.

He also saw an unusually hairy Honeybee in a cosmos flower in the Rose Garden, and could hardly believe that it was a Honeybee, but it doesn't seem to be anything else.

And he got a fine picture of a Common Darter dragonfly, showing that its red colour extends to the roots of the wings, and also on to the pterostigmata, the little solid bits on the leading edge of each wing that act as weights to control its profile as it flaps. On a Red-Veined Darter the red is much more extensive, as we saw earlier when there were a lot of them on the Round Pond.

Migrant Hawker dragonflies were zooming around, and a couple of Brown Hawkers too, but none of them would stop for a photograph. However, several Willow Emerald damselflies perched in the trees by the Italian Garden and allowed their pictures to be taken.