The female Little Owl near the leaf yard knows me and is not worried by being filmed, but someone passing the tree with a dog got a furious stare.

Several families of Great Tits were making a commotion in an oak tree near the bridge.

Blue Tit fledglings were also clamouring to be fed.

Their parents are looking very tatty from the strain of nesting and feeding their young.

A young Wren perched on a twig near the Italian Garden. An adult would have fled as soon as I looked at it.

There was a young Carrion Crow a few feet away on the dead willow tree, probably too young and gormless to be a threat to the Wren.

A young Starling was examining flowers at the Lido resturant, hoping to find insects in them.

This is the rock under the waterfall in the Dell which the Grey Wagtails often use as a base for hunting insects. A Mistle Thrush had the same idea.

A rock under the second waterfall had a Moorhen nesting on it. The pair have already tried nesting on a rock a few yards downstream, but nothing came of it.

The Coots under the willow tree near the bridge have decorated their nest with feathers shed by the Mute Swans on the bank nearby. The swans and geese are beginning their summer moult.

Near the island, a swan mother didn't really know what to do when the local Coot family charged in beside her cygnets.

Families of Greylag Geese and Coots were uncomfortably close to each other at the Dell restaurant. But the serious aggression of the Greylag gander was reserved for a rival.

The 15 Canada goslings are growing fast.

The Great Crested Grebes at the island are sadly now down to one chick. While it was chasing its parent demanding to be fed, it passed the nest and there was a young Grey Heron standing on it. The chick was too young to be alarmed, but the parent was furious.

I have never seen a damselfly like this before, with a red thorax and a blue-tipped black abdomen, and am quite unable to identify it. It was near the bridge. Wish I could have got a sharper picture, but I still haven't got my good lens back from being serviced.

Update: David Element identifies it as a female Blue-Tailed Damselfly, 'of which,' he writes, 'there are several age-associated colour forms.'

This moth also baffled me, in spite of having a good book on British butterflies and moths. There are quite a lot of moths with this dead leaf look, but its position makes it hard to identify.

Update: David Element has identified this too. It's a Silver Y moth, Autographa gamma, so called because its markings resemble the Greek letter gamma γ (and, of course, our capital Y). It's a migrant from southern Europe, which flies north to breed in spring and early summer.

The shrubberies around the Long Water are loud with the cries of young tits calling for food. Most of them are deep in the bushes, but you can get an occasional glimpse of a Great Tit arriving with a caterpillar ...

... and feeding a fledgling.

The Blue Tits were more elusive, but I managed to get one shot of a fledgling.

The Grey Wagtails nesting under the little plank bridge across the waterfall in the Dell are also feeding their young. Here are some views of them, shot from above and below the waterfall.

The female Little Owl was on the same tree as yesterday, just uphill from the nest tree.

There are even more Canada goslings on the Serpentine, and I think the number has now climbed to 34. Here are the most recent four.

The Greylags are also doing well, and have reached 25. Here are 15 of them.

The Mute Swans on the Long Water parked their cygnets on the gravel strip at the Vista. Their mother was not worried by a Moorhen passing close to them, though a Coot would have been pecked away.

Their father chased off a couple of intruding swans.

Yesterday Virginia found five Mallard ducklings near the Lido. They were four or five days old. They've been hard to see because the Lido swimming area is now gated off for paying customers.

The stringy water weed has spread from the Long Water on to the Serpentine, where a pair of Gadwalls were eating it.

It looks as if this Coot is nesting on a lawn, but in fact it's a dense mat of weed in the water near Peter Pan.

Coots often build short-lived nests in silly places on the edge of the lake, but this nest at the Lido restaurant has a chance of survival, as it is screened by a fence and a large planter that keeps people and dogs away.

An unexciting video of an ordinary Coot family -- but somehow four out of five chicks have survived in an open area of the lake with no cover at all from the hungry gulls.

One should always be correctly attired when feeding the Rose-Ringed Parakeets.

A fine specimen of Giant Hogweed at the southwest corner of the bridge. Fortunately it's too far from the railings for anyone to touch it, since it brings you out in large and painful blisters.

Virginia sent me this remarkable photograph of a Coot chick emerging from the egg. You can see its parent's foot. The other chicks ate some of the broken egg shell, a useful source of calcium for growing bones.

I had a trip round the island, courtesy of Bluebird Boats. It is absolutely lined with Coot nests and chicks of all sizes ...

... and there is also a brood of Moorhens. The chicks can climb through the mesh of the wire baskets of plants surrounding the island.

The wire mesh barriers of the small boathouses, intended to keep birds out, are no obstacle to adult Coots ...

... which simply dive underneath.

There must have been at least four Mute Swan nests on the island, since there are three families on the Serpentine. They are very hard to see from the land or the water. A fourth nest on the corner of the island, which was occupied for some time, seems to have been a failure, abandoned with infertile eggs in it.

The island has a circular wire fence on it, and one pair of swans always nests just inside the gate. When the cygnets hatch, the family spends a lot of time sitting in the gateway, making it hard for other birds to pass, both the other swans and the geese which nest inside the enclosure. Here the mother of the family brings her cygnets ashore in front of the gate.

The heavy growth of weed on the Long Water, brought on by the recent warm weather, provides a feast for Mute Swans. But  only the dominant family can enjoy it, as they have chased all the other swans away on to the Serpentine.

The newest Egyptian Goose family on the Round Pond still has seven goslings, in spite of attacks by the dominant Egyptian family. There are not many gulls on the pond at the moment, another bonus.

The teenage Grey Heron which has been occupying the abandoned heron nest on the island flew up to a very thin treetop and had to flap to keep its balance.

Even when the weather is dry there is enough water left in the place on the Vista where the drain is broken for a Wood Pigeon to enjoy a cooling bath on a hot day. They are not fussy about the water being muddy,

The female Little Owl near the leaf yard was in the tree on the uphill side of the nest tree.

A young Robin in the leaf yard waited on a twig for its parents to bring food.

Some Long-Tailed Tits flew through the nearby trees.

A male Black-Tailed Skimmer dragonfly basked on a warm granite kerbstone. Their blue-grey colour is a loose powdery coating -- this is called pruination. Heavy rain can wash it off, leaving them looking much like the yellow and black females.

A Wren uttered loud alarm calls and zigzagged from tree to tree,  evidently trying to mislead a predator about the location of the nest to which it was bringing a lacewing. It had reason to be careful, as there was a Jay in the branches above.

A young Great Tit was begging for food in a bush beside the Long Water.

It got some.

There was a young Robin in the next bush.

A Starling searched in the grass for wireworms and brought them to its fledgling. This video was shot near the Italian Garden -- you can hear the fountains.

A Nuthatch appeared in the leaf yard, collected some pine nuts, and took them away to a nearby tree.

The Song Thrushes are singing less now, but we still get a few cheerful phrases. This one was beside the Long Water.

The female Little Owl at the leaf yard was in a tree just up the hill from her nest tree.

There is absolutely no sign of owlets near any of the Little Owls' nest trees, which is disappointing.

A Coot which was building a nest in a silly place on the edge of the Serpentine defied a Grey Heron which had got too near its pointless construction.

Another Coot had found a nest site in a much better place, in the reeds under the parapet of the Italian Garden.

The Coot nesting at the Dell restaurant, which originally laid 14 eggs of which five hatched, has thrown a lot of eggs out of the nest. But it is keeping a few which it believes are still developing, and is turning them carefully. Presumably birds can hear a live chick in the egg when it reaches a reasonable size.

We haven't had a picture of the Mute Swan family on the Long Water for a while, so here are the four cygnets with their mother.

Their father has cleared almost all the other swans off his territory. There were just a handful of swans hanging around nervously by the bridge.

It's impossible to keep count of the Greylag, Canada and Egyptian goslings which are now all over the Serpentine. Probably there are about 70 in all.

The geese and their goslings are perfectly at ease with humans (as long as they don't have dogs).

But there's just one Mallard duckling. Ducks' careless parenting and the many hungry Herring Gulls combine to reduce the survival rate almost to zero.

The dark Mallard brothers were eating midges, which are swarming thickly on the lake.

A Red-Tailed Bumblebee (Bombus lapidarius) gathered nectar from a cornflower in the wildflower patch behind the Lido.

I wish I could have got a better picture of it, as it is the first time I have seen this species. With luck I should get my good lens back from being serviced early next week, and the quality of pictures should go up again.

The pair of Little Owls near the leaf yard were side by side on a branch.

They have been together for at least six years, and sometimes you can see how fond they are of each other.

A Mistle Thrush in a tree scolded a Carrion Crow on the ground underneath. It flew around several trees, still calling, to confuse the crow about where its nest was.

A Blackcap sang from a tree beside the Long Water. It could be dimly seen deep in the leaves, staring suspiciously at me. They are very shy birds.

But a young Starling on an umbrella at the Lido restaurant was not in the least disturbed by being photographed.

This lamp post on the south side of the Serpentine is a busy place, with Blue Tits constantly visiting the nest inside. The chicks can be heard inside the lamp post clamouring for food.

The shore here is a mass of goslings from end to end. Here the Canada Geese with a brood of 15 take them down to the water.

The families of Greylags were on the grass higher up the bank.

Here are views of the three Mute Swan families on the Serpentine, with a total of 15 cygnets. The family on the Long Water, on the other side of the bridge, has a further four.

Great Crested Grebes are now nesting in several places: in the fallen poplar tree in the Long Water ...

... in the reed bed farther north ...

... and, unfortunately, on a string of buoys in the Serpentine. This is not a good place for a nest, as the buoys will be moved soon.

A grebe hunted for fish in one of the wire baskets of twigs under the bridge.

At this time of year the twigs should be full of small perch.

A Grey Heron preferred to fish in a patch of water weed. This hides the heron from the fish, but the heron can still see movement through the gaps and strike accurately.

The Coots' nest in the netting around the reed bed east of the Lido has now hatched. The Coot chicks can get through the mesh, and when they are a little older they will be able to dive under it, since it only reaches a short way below water level.

There is a new nest on the chains at the bridge. A Coot added a pink plastic teaspoon to it.