The lonely Black Swan on the Round Pond seems to have found a new friend, not a Mute Swan but the odd Canada Goose with a speckled head. I filmed them together on Sunday, and they were still together this afternoon. Maybe the Canada is lonely too, excluded by its normal relatives.
A packet of cornflakes dumped on the edge of the Round Pond started a feeding frenzy with the numerous swans and any bird that could fit into the mob.
A skein of Canada Geese flew round the Serpentine several times before splashing down.
The trio of the Gadwall drake and two Mallards is still together, and they were on the edge of the lake by the Dell restaurant.
The young Great Crested Grebe from the nest by the bridge was fishing by itself in the blue reflection of the pontoons.
A young Moorhen stared suspiciously at the camera by the Dell retaurant.
Young gulls love things that roll, and this Herring Gull played with a good round conker before flying away with it.
A Wren in the Dell paused for a moment in a bush.
One of the Coal Tits came out in the big yew tree to take pine nuts.
A Coal Tit in the Rose Garden waited in a rose bush. Both of these are paired but only one of each appeared.
The familiar Robin perched in a small hawthorn.
The male Chaffinch was under a bush ...
... with his mate on a stem above.
A Magpie looked down from the red Japanese maple by the bridge.
A Carrion Crow perched next to a false yucca in an urn in the Italian Garden. This is one of the original urns from 1860, very eroded by weather and with a new swan head put on at the restoration of the garden in 2011.
A Buff-Tailed Bumblebee fed on an arbutus flower in the Rose Garden.
The bright red flowers of a bottlebrush bush, Malaleuca rugulosa, in the Dell, interested a wasp but it didn't land.
A little clump of Common Bonnet mushrooms appeared by the Queen's Gate crossing of the Flower Walk. The scientific name is Mycena galericulata, both also hat words. Mycena refers to the hats worn by the inhabitants of Mycenae, and galericulata is Latin for 'wearing a little hat'.
Two lost souls unite in the missing holes
ReplyDeleteI'm glad Black Swan has made a companion. I was really routing for him to meet someone of his kind when he left the park earlier this year, but he came back empty handed. Must be so hard to be rejected and ignored all the time. Reminds me of the old game show blankety blank. Blankety blank. Blanket blank, blankety blank, blankety blank.
Sean
Do I take it the bottlebrush is into its second flowering this year, since in UK I have only ever known them to flower in May-June?
ReplyDeleteAlso the Mandarin Duck is Aix galericulata, and the Common Skullcap (flower) Scutellaria galericulata, in further headdress-y references. Jim
It's not just the bottlebrush. Several other flowering bushes have blossomed after the recent unseasonably mild spell. Saturday's picture of the Robin at Mount Gate shows it in front of an out-of-focus hypericum flower.
DeleteThanks for the hat references. Taxonomic names do seem to run on tramlines -- the Wren and the Chimpanzee are inexplicably on the Troglodytes tram.
I have never understood two scientific bird names: Troglodytes for the Wren (when did they ever live in a cave?) and Atthis for the Kingfisher. Alcedo of course is its Latin name, but why Atthis? I've been wondering for years.
DeleteI wonder if the Black Swan looks at the speckled-headed Canada Goose and thinks, it's got enough black on it, maybe it's family?
Tinúviel
No, neither do I understand calling the Wren Trogolodyes (twice). Its application to the Chimpanzee is quite understandable in view of the various ancient legends about primitive cave dwellers in Africa. Atthis, I suppose, is a variant spelling of Attis, a name for the bird into which Philomele and Procne were transformed, usually considered to be a Swallow or Nightingale, but you know how utterly vague the ancients were about species.
DeleteI think the Black Swan is utterly sick of the treatment it's had from the Mute Swans, and has gone for another large bird that may also be an excluded oddity and lonely. But that's entirely a guess.