Wednesday 25 June 2014

Blue Tits nesting in the top of the park's gas lamp posts are a familiar sight, but Great Tits are too large to get into the holes here. However, this one has found an ideal nest box in the base of a lamp, where there is an access hatch with a round ventilation hole just the right size to let it in.


Fledgelings could be heard cheeping inside.

A large shoal of big carp under the parapet at the Serpentine outflow were surrounded by small fish about an inch and a half long, which they were probably eating because carp will eat anything.


The little fish are exactly the right size for Great Crested Grebes to feed to their chicks, which explains why the grebes have begun nesting. This one is one of a pair with a territory under the bushes at the east end of the island.


They had already begun and abandoned a nest in the spring, when there is less for them to eat. But this time they are probably serious about it.

The Moorhen chicks in the Italian Garden pond were lined up at the edge, eating algae off the stonework.


This Feral Pigeon was sunbathing casually in the middle of the Flower Walk, as people and pushchairs passed within inches.


Evidently it found the sun-warmed surface a pleasant place to sit.

A male Tufted Duck was preening himself near Peter Pan, somehow managing to scratch his belly with a foot while remaining upside down.


The male Little Owl was on his usual branch.


There has been no sign of the two owlets or their mother for some time, and ince they can now fly she may be keeping them in another tree.

2 comments:

  1. i'm pretty sure i saw one of these moorhen chicks being carried away by a large gull in flight this afternoon. there may be one less tomorrow. they had had a go at the nesting coots in the reeds opposite Peter Pan but were driven off. looks like they were more sucesssful in the italian gdns?
    Mark W2

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    1. Will check tomorrow. Earlier this afternoon they had three left from an original five.

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