A teenage Great Crested Grebe was with its mother on the Serpentine when they suddenly decided to take off and fly a short distance. Probably she started it to check that her offspring was airworthy in case they needed to leave, but I had the camera on the young one at the time.
The teenage Egyptian Goose, with its parents at the new reed bed, had a stretch. It's now walking completely without a limp.
This Canada Goose on the south side of the Serpentine was accidentally adopted by Greylags and thinks it's a Greylag now.
This was pointed out to me by Jenna, who had just rescued a Canada that had got stuck in a netted reed bed, a task which involved heroically wading in knee-deep cold smelly mud. She hastened home to warm and clean up.
A Gadwall pair fed among dead leaves at the Serpentine outflow.
A Black-Headed Gull examined an agave in an urn in the Italian Garden.
The dominant gull at the landing stage now has an almost completely dark head.
A pair of Carrion Crows shared a dead fish they had found on the edge of the Serpentine. A Herring Gull tried to shoo them off but didn't make much impression on them.
A Pied Wagtail found one of the tiny larvae that make up a great part of their diet.
A Long-Tailed Tit paused on a winged elm twig at the edge of the Long Water.
A Great Tit and a Blue Tit perched side by side on an unseasonably flowering abelia bush in the Rose Garden.
A Coal Tit also visited.
The Coal Tit in the Dell was waiting in the corkscrew hazel.
Serious stares from Robins that wanted to be fed, in the Rose Garden ...
... at the southwest corner of the bridge ...
... and near the Buck Hill shelter.
The handsome tricolour Feral Pigeon was back in the Flower Walk.
A Rose-Ringed Parakeet chewed next year's leaf buds in a shrub at the back of the Albert Memorial. Their wasteful feeding habits, just squeezing the juice out af a bud and immediately moving on to the next, cause a lot of damage to trees.
Magpies are go!
I wouldn't put it past the magpie to sit on the traffic light so as to manipulate it and create maximum mayhem.
ReplyDeleteDid both Grebes get airborne for a bit? I think they get both their feet in the air briefly in the last seconds. They're like little ekranoplans, in a sense.
Tinúviel
It's the very busy pedestrian crossing outside the Albert Hall. Powerful Magpie says Yes: you cross. Magpie says No: you stay.
DeleteI don't know at what height grebes are really flying and when they are merely depending on surface effect. But they were relatively higher than an ekranoplan, so I think they were really flying. You hardly ever see grebes at any altitude, but I have seen one flying over Hyde Park Corner when moving from St James's Park to the Serpentine, and it was about 15 m up.
Well done to Jenna for rescuing Fringe (the Canada) from the reed bed; a brave task at any time of year, but that must have some cold November mud to wade through. What Jenna doesn't know about the Serpentine Canadas can be written on the head of a pin :^D
ReplyDeleteShe can recognise them all individually, more than I can do with humans.
Delete"Mate" that looks like a Zander!! Aka the vampire fish.
ReplyDeleteSean