Wolves Wild

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.

A brief video clip. The same St Johns wort bush featured in yesterday’s post. A honey bee and a bumble bee were moving from flower to flower, seeming to spend most of their time both one one flower, then both on another.

One honey bee had discovered a St Johns wort bush covered in flowers, and was trying to visit as many of them as possible despite pollen baskets which looked like they were already full.

Flowers and seed cases on a lone poppy which had managed to infiltrate itself so that it was growing through the small gap between two flagstones.

As the long-legged spider scurried about on its railing (recent post) a barklouse kept popping up from the underside of the rail, rushing round, then retreating back where it appeared from. Was it trying to predate the spider? To scare it off, or perhaps to escape from it?

The recent weather hasn’t been conducive to a summer burst of fungi: alternately very hot and very dry, then damp but cold for the time of year. This bolete, showing alone on long grass in a front garden by a main road into town, is the only one I’ve spotted so far.