Another trip to London and a wander round Kensington Gardens
and Hyde Park en route to a meeting in Greenwich. I spent some time encouraging
birds to feed off my hand and managed to tempt great tit, blue tit starling and
parakeet. I also saw one of the little owls and nuthatch. The nuthatch does not
come to hand, but will lift pine nuts if you set them on the railing and move
back. Mind you he has to beat the tits that are in quickly if he hangs around. Again
all pictures are taken with the iPod or
phone, I really should invest in a good camera.
The famous black swan was around the Lido area, he features on the following blog where his daily philanderings/menage au trois is chronicled by RalphHancock here:
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| Serpentine sunset |
The following day I decided not to visit my usual haunt at Barnes WWT site as I have been there a fair bit and was there at the start of February. Instead I went to one of London’s historic
cemeteries, Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park where a firecrest had been regularly
seen. To cut a long story short I did see it after two and a half hours and
several false alarms. The false alarms were a wren, two blue tits a
treecreeper, a goldcrest and a chiffchaff. The goldcrest in particular had me
for a minute until I saw the head clearly and realised there was no eye stripe.
No mistaking the firecrest once I saw it, bigger, obvious eye stripe and more
orangey bronze on the shoulders – a cracking little bird. Two displaying
sparrowhawks and four jays were also seen in a small wooded area in the east
end of London. I logged twenty species in three hours including a couple of
flyovers and a drumming woodpecker. If you think of your local woodland and add a lot of old gravestones then you have an idea what it is like. It is managed as a nature reserve rather than a cemetery. There is a link to more information here, and if you were in the area it is a nice peaceful spot to wander around in a very built up inner city:
118 Little owl
119 Nuthatch
120 Firecrest
121 Chiffchaff
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