David

Liquidambar tree near the edge of the lake in West Park, with leaves which are just starting to change colour for autumn. As I took a shot to include the tree’s reflection in the lake, I also included a heron perched on a weeping willow on the island.

A mouse spider on a door. I can’t work out why it gets to be called a mouse spider. In close-up its body looks furry, but so do lots of other spiders (and lots of insects). It’s a lot smaller than a mouse. These pictures were taken on a mobile phone, and make it look a lot bigger than it actually was. They also make it look a bit scary. It didn’t, at least to me, in actuality.

Yellow staining agarics are quite common: these pictures are from several different locations which I passed while strolling around Wolverhampton in the first half of the month. They could easily be confused with common field mushrooms, the wild form of ordinary supermarket mushrooms.

But these aren’t good to eat, guaranteeing an upset stomach. The giveaway is the yellow staining – a discolouration of the damaged flesh when the mushrooms are bruised or broken.

Growing from a thin layer of moss on the top of a stone wall, a single tiny mushroom. It’s not the first time there’s been one there around this time of year.

Autumn is spider season, or at least the time of year when a lot of species become more visible, both around the home and outdoors. or many spider species, autumn is the mating season.

I don’t know if this little spider is one of those. It was busy rushing round its web, which was on the bridge carrying the Castlecroft road across the Railway Walk. As it moved, it cast a sharp-edged shadow in the bright sunlight.

Colourful fly agarics in the shelter of a beech hedge at Bantock Park. Underground, they are intertwined with the roots of one of the silver birches which are a few yards away.

A group of earthstars from the Tettenhall churchyard. They are one of the rarer earthstar species, and had clearly been up for some time. They were battered – some looked like they had been kicked.

Most autumns, the corner of Tettenhall Upper Green between the paddling pool and the main road has tiny mushrooms barely peeping out of the short grass. They are parrot waxcaps. Bright yellow and shiny when they first emerge, they later turn to a shade of green somewhat similar to the feathers of some parrots: in some of these specimens, that change of colour is just beginning.

It;s possible that some of these pictures are of a related species. Butter waxcaps are also bright yellow and glossy, but don’t change colour.

It seems likely we’re in for a continuing spell of wet and breezy weather, so it’s unlikely we’ll get a good display of autumn leaves this year. Some bright colours are developing on trees such as ornamental cherries, such as these trees in Bantock Park.

The autumnal storms from the middle of last month brought a lot of rain. At the same time, the temperatures didn’t drop below the seasonal average until very recently. That’s a combination which encourages a lot of fungi to send out their fruiting bodies, at the time of year when the number of species which do so is at the peak. I haven’t been able to get out to anywhere that real surprises are possible. But even strolling around within the city, there’s been a good range of species.

Yellow cracking boletes are normally quite big for mushrooms, with caps which can get up to four inches or so across. This individual had forced its way up in the small patch of open soil surrounding a roadside tree, and was less than one inch.