A Grey Wagtail hunting on the thick smelly mat of algae under the Italian Garden found a noisome larva. It seems that the problem with blue-green cyanobacteria is getting worse every year, and only moderately warm weather is needed to bring the stuff up. But there's really nothing that can be done about this, as any countermeasures would wreck the delicate ecology of the lake.
A young Blackbird, still with some gingery juvenile feathers, came down to the Dell stream to have a drink and wash its face.
A Blue Tit ...
... and a Coal Tit were in a sycamore sapling. They still haven't found a comfortable place to perch after the wanton destruction of the corkscrew hazel bush.
A Robin at Mount Gate was probably one of this year's young ones, with fresh adult plumage.
One of the regular Robins in the Flower Walk checked the sky overhead to see if it was safe to come over for a pine nut.
The male Little Owl at the Serpentine Gallery was showing off the magnificent eyebrows he inherited from his father, who was the smallest Little Owl with the biggest eyebrows I've ever seen.
It's impossible to go anywhere between the Flower Walk and the bridge without being picked up by the four Jays insistently demanding peanuts.
You don't often get a Carrion Crow and a Great Crested Grebe in the same picture. They were at Fisherman's Keep, and completely ignored each other. They live in different worlds.
The grebes from the east end of the island were each taking care of one chick. These two were not far from their nest ...
... and the others were at the far end of the island. The chick seemed uncomfortably close to a Cormorant, but in fact I've never seen much conflict between the species. A grebe is much quicker off the mark than a heavy Cormorant.
A chick on the Long Water got too pushy with a parent and was chased away.
One of the young Grey Herons from the fifth nest was fishing from the jetty at the Lido.
They are entirely independent now, and if you see a heron in that nest it's always an adult.
A Honeybee browsed on lantana flowers in the Rose Garden.
I think this black bee on a Michaelmas daisy is a Carpenter Bee, some species of Xylocopa. It wouldn't pose for a better picture and soon vanished into the dense clump. Later: a good suggestion that it might be Andrena scotica.
The gaudy flowers planted to cheer up the drab view of the bandstand lavatories include this strange Bird of Paradise Flower, Strelitzia reginae.
The young Greg Heron looks like a dwarf. Never seen one so small like that before.
ReplyDeleteSean
Our xylocopae are black all over, but I guess that's not a violet carpenter bee?
ReplyDeleteTo think that such beautiful colours should be on account of such toxic, foul, noxious causes. There's a lesson somewhere in that, I guess.
Tinúviel
Violet Carpenter Bees only arrived here a few years ago and remain rare, so if this bee is a Xylocopa it's a different species. Also, it wasn't very large, about the size of a Honeybee. I can't find any more useful information.
DeleteI'm not totally sure on your bee Ralph, but we don't have any regular Xylocopa species resident in the UK, though X. violacea is recorded several times most years but is all dark, huge & nothing like this. I've seen many in Europe but none here. There are other species very similar to this species such as X. valga which may occur as an accidental import with timber.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if it is a late generation Andrena scotica, slightly worn?
Your suggestion is certainly more likely. But we do get adventitious insects from the container terminals in the estuary, such as the Isodonta mexicana which was first seen in Greenwich and has now got into central London where I have seen it twice.
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