Lewis and Clark remembered

I've already filmed the Magpie family in the Dell playing silly games in this spot beside the stream. Today two young ones were chasing each other round an Australian tree fern, one of the many subtropical plants in the Dell.

A Carrion Crow on a stump at Temple Gate was planning some awful exploit.

Just up the hill, the male Little Owl was in his usual lime tree.

Long-Tailed Tits often hunt at the northwest corner of the bridge, where there was at least one nest in the spring.

Ahmet Amerikali photographed a Chiffchaff in the scrubby patch east of the Lido.

He also got this dramatic shot of a Black-Headed Gull catching and eating a surprisingly large carp. This is our Czech visitor, ET05.589 / Orange 2V57. He is the dominant gull of the southern shore and east end of the Serpentine, and has taken over the territory of the other dominant gull White 2331, who was found dead in Latvia in May. It seems that the farthest travelled gulls are not only the most dominant but the most predatory.

A young Black-Headed Gull at Peter Pan had probably travelled no farther than the Thames estuary, where there are several breeding ground such as the Pitsea landfill site at Basildon.

Pigeon Eater was on the prowl at the Dell restaurant, head down in his hunting attitude. He didn't get a pigeon while I was there.

A young Lesser Black-Backed Gull on the roof was begging insistently at him, and was very likely his offspring.

A male Pied Wagtail on the edge of the terrace, in search of smaller prey, ran right under my feet.

The Grey Heron from the Italian Garden stepped around the swan nesting island, unused since the Canada Geese nested on it in spring and now overgrown with Great Willowherb.

The Great Crested Grebes at Fisherman's Keep are down to one chick, but this is already quite large, growing fast, and diving energetically. It could swallow the fairly large fish its father broughts, which would have been too much for it a week ago.

The other grebe family, still with two chicks, were in the middle of the lake and too far off for a good picture.

The Egyptian Geese at Fisherman's Keep are holding on to their four goslings, but there's a long way to go.

The Tufted Duck family were by the reeds at the east end of the Lido. The ducklings were diving furiously all over the place, but I managed to count seven and also to get four into the picture.

A Red-Veined Darter dragonfly turned up unexpectedly on the parched grass by the Serpentine Gallery.

A Common Carder bee, faded from ginger to blonde, browsed on French lavender in the Rose Garden.

The insects here showed a marked preference for the herbaceous border beds with mauve and purple flowers, but now they have started spreading into the red and orange beds. A Buff-Tailed Bumblebee visited a Peruvian lily.

A Painted Lady butterfly harmonised with Lewisia flowers. 

I hadn't known what this plant was until an American visitor told me that it was a native of the western United States and named after Meriwether Lewis, commander of the expedition that penetrated to the west coast between 1804 and 1806. His companion William Clark is also commemorated in the Clarkia flower, a better known species although I had no idea that it was called after the explorer.