Tuesday 6 May 2014

At the bottom of this frenzied mob of Mallard drakes near Peter Pan is a female Mallard. Luckily she managed to escape, and flew off with all the males in pursuit.


The Coot seems to have joined in just for fun.

There was also a rather gruesome sight, a Coot eating a dead chick of its own species.


There is no way of telling how the chick died. Birds are not sentimental, but they are very economical, and anything edible gets eaten.

The Egyptian Goose family I photographed yesterday with eleven young on the south side of the Serpentine were still in the same place today, and still had all eleven of them. Their mother, in the background, kept the smallest ones under her wings while the others nestled close to her. But she could still not cover them all, and the one in the foreground was sheltering under its father. For some reason it wriggled out and started pecking him on the wing, causing him to get up and reveal another chick on the far side of him.


This Greenfinch was singing in the scrubby area on the west side of the Long Water near the bridge.


He has been in this place for several weeks. I haven't seen a female around here.

A Feral Pigeon was enjoying a bath on a duckboard in the Italian Garden.


This rather dull picture was not taken in the park. Yesterday evening I was on my bicycle going along the south bank of the river, upstream of Battersea Bridge near St Mary's church. There is a boat launching ramp here, and a small local colony of Greylag Geese come up it and eat the grass in the churchyard and on the lawns of the nearby housing estate. Three pairs have goslings. Here an intruding Egyptian Goose is chased off.

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