Wolves Wild

A particularly vivid red rose which was one of the flowers in the (beer) garden of the Bishops Castle Hotel, built on the site of the former castle in the eponymous Shropshire town.

A tiny beetle feeding on one  of the ox-eye daisy flowers of St John’s churchyard, Bishops Castle. Like many churchyards, some areas of grass are left unmown until later in the summer to encourage the growth of wildflowers.

A cucumber spider (probably a female) on a zinnia flower. A common garden spider, but often missed, because its green body is inconspicuous against the green of the vegetation forming its normal habitat. The contrast with the red here, on the contrary, made it sand out clearly.

Spotted, of all places, from the garden seating of the Pharmacy Poetry bookshop’s café in Bishops Castle.  The zinnia were the cut flowers on the table.

The graveyard at St John’s church, Bishops Castle. Some of these tombstones have been standing for around two centuries, in an atmosphere low in industrial pollution, and likely lots of rainfall over the years. Ideal conditions for the growth of a variety of different lichens.

Same St John’s wort bush as in the other recent posts, seen a few days later. I suppose it’s possible the same bee features. This time I had the camera set up to take a slow motion video.
I think the slowed-down sounds resemble the ambient noise of a wildlife film in a tropical jungle.

Bishops castle in the Shropshire Hills, hard by the Welsh border. Red kites circling on thermals overhead. Swifts hunting insects, zooming past inches from the hotel window, while a webcam in a nestbox was beaming live coverage of another brooding eggs to a screen in the hotel bar. A great mob of jackdaws: what seemed to be two clans which circled the town a couple of times a day, a group of perhaps a hundred following another, somewhat larger one.

Sadly, I didn’t manage to get any pictures of any of these things. I did, however, manage to get this series of a few of the jackdaws when they had paused their flight over the town, and had settled down to rest, in pairs, on some of the roofs.