Wednesday 3 April 2013


Yesterday's Tawny Owl was in the Flower Walk again. There are several evergreen trees along this path, and it has been seen in several of them: yews, an ilex, and today it was in whatever this is -- I am hopeless at trees, so I just picked some leaves to photograph. It is a tall, bushy tree on the north side of the path, about 50 yards from crossing with the path from the Albert Memorial.


The owl stays deep in the foliage and is hard to see and impossible to photograph. Nor, of course, do we know whether it is our familiar owl from the nest tree beyond the Physical Energy statue. Some people from the Royal College of Art, just the other side of Kensington Road, report having heard a Tawny Owl hooting several times in the past months, so it may be another bird altogether.

There were two male Northern Wheatears on the Parade Ground this morning between the area where the grass is being renovated and Park Lane. They were moving up and down the edge of the park between Hyde Park Corner and Marble Arch. When I went there, unfortunately I couldn't find them, so I can't offer you a picture. This is not much of a day for photographs, I am afraid. There were, however, about 40 Redwing in the area along with a few Fieldfares, some feeding on the grass and others in the surrounding trees.


The long-running dispute about ownership of the nest at the east end of the Serpentine continues. Here a couple of Mallards have claimed it from the Coots that have recntly been occupying it. However, these ducks would not be serious about nesting in such an exposed position.


The three speckled Canada-Greylag hybrid geese, who are certainly siblings, have been going around together since they arrived. But now they have made friends with an unrelated hybrid, the one on the left in this picture.


On the whole, Canada-Greylag hybrids associate with Greylags; they always have Greylag mothers and are imprinted on them. And on the whole they seem to be accepted by the others. However, it does seem that they have some sense of not being quite the same, which has led to the formation of this little group of different geese.

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