The female Little Owl at the Serpentine Gallery was hiding in the leaves of the big plane tree ...
... where her daughter appeared later.
The male owlet was very visible in a lime. He is much less shy than his sister.
In the Flower Walk the old female Chaffinch ...
... and the young male came out to catch thrown pine nuts in midair.
A Jay in a winged elm near the Italian Garden waited to fly out and grab a peanut.
Ahmet Amerikali saw several Reed Warblers here, in the bed on the east side of the Long Water.
%202026%205a..jpg)
He also found the young Grey Wagtail near the Lido.
%202026%201a.jpg)
The Grey Heron in the Italian Garden was using a duckboard as a fishing station. It yawned.
A brief clip of the feeding frenzy caused by throwing a bit of French bread into the water when there are Black-Headed Gulls around. The gull that gets it has to flee a furious pursuit by its companions.
The Great Crested Grebe chicks at the east end of the Serpentine island took a turn in the water while their parents preened the feathers ruffled by carrying them.
One the other side of the lake the single chick accepted a small fish from its mother.
The Egyptian family went by, still with four goslings.
The Tufted ducklings are already skilled divers.
The single cygnet on the Long Water ate poplar leaves from an overhanging branch.
There are many varieties of salvia in the park and all of them are popular with bees. Buff-Tailed Bumblebees and Common Carders thronged a large patch in the Italian Garden.
In the Rose Garden a Common Carder browsed on a clump of sedum.
I think this fly on a strawflower is Tachina magnicornis, which seems to have no common name.
The fly isn't a hoverfly at all, but belongs to a totally different family of flies which are parasitoids, the Tachinidae, which tend to be quite bristly as here. I hadn't heard of T. magnicornis, though was familiar with the common T. fera, though looking the former up it appears the former is a fairly recent arrival which is now present in the London area. With the darker legs I think your ID is probably correct, but not a group I know well.
ReplyDeleteThanks. I hadn't realised that they weren't included in the description of hoverflies. I had never seen this one before but was fairly confident about the ID from the colour of the legs. There was a fly that I thought was the other possiblility, T,.fera, in the Rose Garden a couple of years ago.
Delete