On a cold morning I could hardly get past the bridge for the hordes of ravenous Great Tits blasting out of the bushes. One posed in the pretty red leaves of a spindle bush.
Ahmet Amerikali got a good shot of the Cetti's Warbler that lives in the brambles here.
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A Coal Tit in the Rose Garden waited in a tree ...
... a Blue Tit on a teasel ...
... and the male Chaffinch in the top of the tall lime hedge.
A Coal Tit in the yew in the Dell ...
... was joined by a Goldcrest. They are regularly in the two big yew trees but not much seen. They ignore humans and can't be fed, though I think one might come to a feeder if the management hadn't banned them..
A Song Thrush was just visible above the top of the big bramble patch to the north of Peter Pan.
A Jay came out on the railings.
A Magpie posed grandly on an umbrella at the Lido restaurant.
A Carrion Crow dunked some peanuts in the Serpentine.
Pigeon Eater didn't stalk this Feral Pigeon on the ground as he usually does. He was twenty feet away and noticed it not paying attention, so he flew at it. I got the camera rolling just after he carried it into the water to kill it by biting through its spinal cord with his powerful beak.
A young Herring Gull found a ball in the lake which someone threw for a dog. They particularly love toys that roll, and it played with the ball for two minutes. I filmed the whole thing, and haven't cut it.
The young Great Crested Grebe from the nest at the bridge can now usually be seen hunting under the edge of the pontoons, clearly a good spot to find fish lurking in the shadows.
A Moorhen admired its reflection beside the Mute Swans' nesting island.
A Cormorant took off and flew down the Long Water.
A tough Buff-Tailed Bumblebee was browsing on fatsia flowers by the bridge. Thanks to their insulating fur coat they can keep going in cold weather by constant buzzing and plenty of nectar.
Extremely pretty picture of the Great Tit. I'm not sure if it sang for its supper, but it certainly posed for it.
ReplyDeletePigeon Eater is now as efficient as a machine. Poor pigeon. As a palate cleaners, the two minutes of the young Herring Gull playing ball was endearing. I'm sure there is an evolutionary advantage to making things roll, but I'm certain they also do it because it's fun.
Tinúviel
It's a mercy that Herring Gulls have such feeble little feet. If they'd had prehensile feet they'd have invented the wheel and would be driving around in cars while we crouched naked and shivering in the bushes.
DeleteAs you might have seen there was a hoar frost well into London last night, so more severe than forecast. I wish more of the Aurora displays were, at least, as good as forecast. Jim
ReplyDeleteI think the aurora will always be a damp squib at these latitudes. The colours are too faint for the human eye to see, because our colour vision cuts out below a certain light level. So the only way of getting an idea of what the aurora 'really' looks like is to take a digital photograph, as the camera sensor will record colours even at very low levels, and then mess around with the picture on a computer till it looks the way you expect it to look -- influenced by seeing other digital photographs of the aurora.
DeleteIt's not much cop as a naked-eye spectacle from London. I travelled 30 miles north of London on 11/5/24 and was hearing from observers in Hampstead of a tall reddish shaft in the northern sky. I couldn't see this and was giving up when I saw something similar rising from over my shoulder, and that blew my mind. More appeared and the radiating pattern could still be seen well amid street lighting but then only coloured in photographs. I could make out some of it faintly back in London same night, but there only by looking for similar structure, and probably likewise on 10/10/24. The displays a week ago apparently got to the same league, but mostly very late at night and marred by cloud in much of the country. Jim
DeleteA friend in Essex managed to get some photographs, but they were red only and really the only impressive thing about them was that he got them at all.
DeleteYou've probably covered it before but when and why did management ban bird feeders, and has this policy affected bird populations? Thanks!
ReplyDeleteThey banned feeders three years ago, after someone put up a large and messy collection of feeders, fat balls etc. near the cavalry memorial. And they banned feeding two years ago. There was a reason, I suppose, because some people were coming in with bags of bread and just dumping them on the shore, usually at the Triangle because they couldn't be bothered to walk more than a few years from the car park. But rather than deal with that, they banned feeding entirely and started defacing the park with threatening and ungrammatical notices. It's almost always the case that the more notices are put up, the less well the organisation is functioning.
DeleteAnd it hasn't stopped feeding and has made no difference to the bird population in that way. On the other hand bad enviromental management is reducing populations of some birds, notably by clearing away the vital leaf litter in shrubberies with leaf blowers and reducing habitat by cutting down bramble thickets in Kensington Gardens and destroying the shrubbery in the Rose Garden.
DeleteThank you for these informative replies. Glad the feeding bans have not impacted the birds adversely. Good point about the leaves - will make sure to leave some under the shrubberies out my way.
DeleteA layer of dead leaves keeps down unwanted plants (I don't like the term 'weeds') so leaving them is a win-win: less work, better results. If only the blockheads in charge of the park could realise this: I have written to them again and again but you might as well talk to a lump of concrete.
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