Author: David

A bright red hollyhock flower in the garden of Anne Hathaway’s cottage in Shottery, one of the plants still in bloom early last month.

A pair of swans on the Avon just upstream from Stratford with their five cygnets, then settled ashore for the young birds to preen their downy feathers.

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.