The first I’v seen of this year’s crop of young birds on the West Park lake – a mallard with her two ducklings. The young birds looked so small and fluffy I thought they were less than a day old. But they looked no different twenty-four hours later (pictures soon).
Male blackbird, alert, on the lookout from the branch of a bush by the side of the Severn at Bridgnorth.
Two mallard drakes, part of the West Park duck population, asleep or resting balancing on the line of rope separating the boating area from the rest of the lake. It seems a very strange place to choose, but it gets well used.
I’m not sure why this carrion crow had its head to one side at the moment I took the picture. It must have been a brief movement as the bird walked to the edge of West Park lake for a drink of water.
Female damsel fly resting on the handrail of the Compton Park pool. This one was active in the early July of 2014.
Hellebore flowering in a shrubbery bed at Bantock Park in early June last year.
Speckled moth, possibly a carpet moth species, which came indoors at around this season a couple of years ago.
Swan with one of the 2014 cygnets on the lake at West Park.
There are two clans of swans which have had breeding success for the past couple of years, so that the population had risen to the mid-teens on the lake earlier this year, with occasional spats.
More recently, the numbers on the water have gone down. Hopefully those reaching maturity will have headed off to find their own territories elsewhere, but probably some have been on the islands, brooding.
Tulips in someone’s front garden, glowing in the bright, low-angled light of an early morning sun. The flowers were dusted by a barely perceptible trace of overnight frost.
Orange tip butterfly at rest, pictured in May 2014. Orange tips are flighty butterflies, frequently visible only at a distance.
This one does not have an orange tip to the forewings – that is found only in the males.
Protected from predators by spikes and a mass of hair, peacock butterflies on their preferred food plant, nettle leaves. These were on plants growing by the path through Compton Rough in June 2014.
May (hawthorn) just beginning to flower at the start of the month, at what was also the beginning of thd first spell of really warm weather this year – and a time of accelerated development for many plants.