Hungry owlet

The female Little owlet at the Serpentine Gallery was making begging calls in the plane tree. It was late afternoon and she was hungry. In natural surroundings Little Owls can hunt worms and beetles and feed their young all day, but in the park with people and dogs all over the ground they can only do this at dawn and dusk. Nevertheless, Little Owls are breeding well in the park.

A Wren sang on a cypress branch in the Dell.

This Robin in a flower bed at Mount Gate has adult plumage, but the yellow edge at the base of its bill shows that it's quite young. I think this may be the Robin that I glimpsed briefly here several months ago when it still had juvenile spotted plumage, and which has now grown up.

The Coot on the swan nesting raft at the Triangle was standing up and looking agitated, chewing nervously at a toe. I don't think the eggs are hatching already, and from another angle you could see them intact in the nest, so I don't know what was going on.

The Great Crested Grebe on the nest under the Dell restaurant balcony had a visit from two Mute cygnets. There are only three of these on the lake at the moment, as one has just been picked up suffering from water inhalation, a very serious thing for birds with their delicate complex respiratory system. It's being looked after at the moment and we hope it will recover and be returned to the family.

Now it would be unfair to point the finger at the obvious culprit ... 

... but these swans have now lost three cygnets. One went very early and may have been snatched by Pigeon Eater or another gull ...

... but the others were growing well and too large for a gull to grab. The family had been coming up the lake past the island, getting dangerously close to the Black Swan's territory. Then they lost a cygnet and immediately retreated to the far end of the lake, from which they have not emerged. But now they have nearly lost another to what looks like a deliberate swan attack.

The Black Swan's hybrid cygnet was eating Skullcap, Scutellaria galericulata, under the supervision of its mother 4GIQ. The plant is recommended as a mild sedative and nerve tonic. Its odd name comes from the supposed resemblance of the flower to a little medieval helmet. It doesn't look a bit like one to me.

There was a report of an Egyptian in a bad way in the Italian Garden, and I went to look after it till Jenna arrived to check it out. This is the male of the pair often seen in the garden. It wasn't too bad, a slight limp and some tattered feathers on its back. Jenna thought it had been in a territorial fight. The female was in the lake under the fountain. We will keep an eye on it for the next few days.

The mother Egyptian with six teenagers hastily crossed the Serpentine Road to avoid an oncoming dog.

There were two other teenagers with their mother at the Vista. Not clear where they came from.

Half a dozen Pochards had joined the crowd of resting duck at the Triangle, absolutely unfazed by passing humans.

A Painted Lady butterfly rested on the path, well camouflaged among the small stones and bits of plant detritus.

A Red Admiral perched on a nettle at the edge of the Caroline enclosure (that is, the scrubby patch at the southeast corner of the Serpentine where there is a memorial to Queen Caroline).

A Comma butterfly flexed its wings on a leaf in the Dell. You can see the little white curved mark on the underwing that gives the species its name.

The herbaceous borders in the Rose Garden have been planted with two different colour schemes, red and orange in one and blue and mauve in the other. The bees greatly prefer the second, and there's hardly an insect to be seen in the first. Here is a Buff-Tailed Bumblebee on something I'd never heard  of, Wavyleaf Sea Lavender, Limonium sinuatum.

A small pink rose was visited by what I am fairly sure is a European Drone Fly, Eristalis arbustorum.

Most of the planting around here is thorougly tasteful, but the gardeners are allowed to go over the top to cheer up the unlovely surroundings of the public lavatory at the bandstand. The result looks so like a Douanier Rosseau jungle that you start looking for a badly painted tiger.