David

Three black headed gulls on a fallen bough by the island in West Park lake, behind them a football which someone kicked too hard.

Although the picture was only taken a few days ago, the gulls still have their breeding season plumage with the dark caps. Bright sunlight shows up these capa as brown, not actually black.

A juvenile squirrel in West Park. It’s easy to tell it’s still young: all the mature ones get fed so many peanuts they are on the large side.

A West Park magpie. Its short tail probably means it’s still a juvenile. Looking rather scruffy with ragged plumage.

Yuccas are evolved for conditions a lot drier and hotter than this summer has been. But these plants, in West Park, still seem to have managed to flower as usual.

It seemed like there were hundreds of yellow and black striped cinnabar moth caterpillars crawling over a patch of ragworts, their yellow stripes matching the yellow of the ragwort flowers. In reality, there were something over fifty, an impressive enough number.

I don’t know if it is just me, but I was quite old before I realised that cobwebs weren’t actually the stereotypical webs of illustrated children’s books like Charlotte’s Web. Different sorts of spiders make webs of all kinds of shape. The “cob” of cobweb points to a 3D shape similar to the type og bread rolls called cobs in some parts of the country, to cobblestones, or to the knobs on the base of the beaks of male swans, cobs.

These two webs are small cobwebs on a low bush in West Park. I noticed them because they had caught a very heavy dew.

Some sort of bellflower flowering inside the fenced off area around the remains of Bridgnorth Castle.

A frog rests in a garden pond which has a surface sprinkled with pondweed. The frog was sheltering from me, and keeping cool on a day which was for once hot and sunny.

The weather warmed up just at the right time for buddleias to flower in profusion this year. Sadly, there have been virtually no butterflies around to take advantage of this abundance on the butterfly bushes. The long term decline because of the various ways the environment is being degraded has been heightened by this year’s mainly cold and wet weather. The same for bees.

So I decided to picture a buddleia flower from a different angle (literally). So here’s an end-on view.

This insect, and not any kind of bird, is the creature responsible for the gobs of froth, so-called cuckoo spit, which appears towards the tops of plants around this time of year.