Author: David

Yellow / green catkins against the bright blue sky of one of the rare sunny mornings recently. They were on a tall hazel tree by the footpath along the Smestow Brook by Newbridge.

This is the same pair of swans in the post yesterday. It was now a half hour or so later, and the swans were still engaging in the same pattern of behaviour.

They had moved a little further away, and across to the far side of the canal – leaving them partially hidden by an overhanging bush. But they were still making the synchronised movements. It was too cold to hang around, so I never saw them mating.

Blushing brackets, the same species of wood-eating fungi which had done for the tree stump in yesterday’s post, here growing on the trunk of an apparently healthy tree. In fact, it was the immediate neighbour of yesterday’s stump.

The white spots on the first picture in the set are spores which were released in the short time while I took the picture of the bracket’s lower surface.

Before swans mate, they engage in a courtship dance, even if they are a long-established pair. For quite some time, they keep interacting, responding to one another. They alternately dip their heads under the water, then raise them beaks dripping. They alternate in upending, so only their tail ends are above the surface. These movements may be performed synchronously rather than alternately. They may nuzzle each others feathers, or dance by waving their flexible necks. Finally they mate, the female almost submerged, before another brief dance.

For lots of the ritual, it isn’t necessarily clear (at least to me) whether their bobbing under the surface is anything more than a search for food. A pair of swans on the canal by Newbridge were, I thought, getting ready to mate. If I’d been closer, I’d have tried to get a brief clip of video to show the way their actions seemed to be directed at their partner.

A tree felled, and the evidence still there of why that had been necessary. Blushing bracket is a fairly common species of fungus which lives on and off quite a few types of trees. It gets its name because the surface of its fruiting bodies turns red when damaged slightly.

From the same garden as the yellow-flowered witch hazel (yesterday’s post), a companion shrub with red flowers. This had recently been given a thorough pruning. Despite that, or because of that, it produced this rich array of flowers.