Wolves Wild

Growing in the River Avon by Lucy’s Mill footbridge, a yellow waterlily in flower.

Not a hornet (yesterday’s post) but a stingless and vegetarian hoverfly which has evolved to look like a hornet as a way of discouraging predators.

Nature red in tooth, claw and more. A hornet captures a bee (honey bee?), immobilises or kills it, they carries it off to its nest.

I thought at first it was crows mobbing a buzzard. When I looked properly, one of the birds was indeed a buzzard. The other was a heron, possibly the young bird pictured in a post a few days ago.

Teazles, recently flowered, in the recently created local nature reserve by the river in Stratford on Avon. The plant was actually a lot more abundant there before it was landscaped into a nature reserve. It had been the dominant vegetation in rough ground, the former site of the town’s landfill site in the middle of the last century, now converted into a pool and scrape.

In the recently created local nature reserve along the Avon near the centre of Stratford, a young heron on the prowl.

It was early August, at the height of the long dry spell, so water levels were low. While we were watching, the bird made several strikes for prey, but didn’t seem to be having any success.