David

Being half-hidden in grass hadn’t protected these fly agaric mushrooms from being eaten.

This dragonfly landed on the parapet of the bridge which carries Castlecroft Road over the Smestow Valley Railway walk just as I was taking the pictures which featured in the previous post.

It didn’t seem at all worried as I turned my camera in its direction and took a series of pictures.

Distorted acorns produced when a tiny wasp lays her egg in them.

Growing on one of the oak trees by the Smestow Valley Railway Walk, right by Castlecroft Road. The view from the bridge put me on the level with the acorns.

According to sources elsewhere on the web, there are occasional years where these galls are very common. I don’t remember ever having seen them before. As far as I could see, every acorn on that oak was affected. I’ve been looking round at other local oak trees since, any not seen any more of these galls – though I haven’t seen many normal-looking acorns either.

Some of the trees right by Bantock House as they began to change colour recently, spotted on the same day as the trees in the picture posted yesterday.

Waxcaps are small, often brightly coloured mushrooms. The blackening waxcap is yellow at first, and gradually turns completely black.

The change in colour has only just begun in the first mushroom – at the peak of the cap and where a section of the rim has been nibbled. The other, pictured at the same time, is already somewhat darker.

Sulfur tufts are distinctive all-yellow mushrooms which grow, usually in clumps, on wood which is rotting underground: normally the roots of former trees.

All the mushrooms shown here are still young. They probably only grew in the night before the pictures were taken.