David

A carrion crow up at the top of a tree in West Park. Its high vantage point would have given it a view over most of the park.

Lots of mushrooms are associated with trees. Some are not very particular about which kind of tree, while others occur only near one type of tree. Brown birch boletes are one such. The clue to the tree is in the name, which also gives an accurate description of the colour.

The reds and yellows of this liquidambar by the lake in West Park did look a bit like those of a particularly vivid flame, especially when reflected in the low waves on the surface of the water.

These circled milkcap mushrooms were growing under hornbeams by the side of a quiet residential street. Mklkcaps are a set of mushrooms which exude a white fluid when damaged. This species has caps zoned in rings in different shades of grey. It’s a species found under deciduous trees, particularly hornbeam.

A lone fly agaric mushroom in Bantock Park, possibly the last one which is likely to emerge this year. A wedge had somehow been removed from the cap, reminding me of a pizza from which one slice had been taken.

Two herons on the same island on West Park lake. Both were on the same side of the island, getting the full benefit of the morning sun.

The bird in the willow tree had already been in a similar spot a few times in the previous weeks, but I hadn’t seen the one on the ground before.

Ripe sloes on a blackthorn bush, which also had a healthy growth of lichens along the branches.

A white bracket fungus growing prolifically on a fallen tree in a wooded area of the Stratford on Avon Recreation Ground.

Medlars, high on the tree in the public gardens by the parish church in Stratford on Avon. All the lower fruit had fallen, and were bletting on the ground.

Bletting, and the Shakespeare connections of medlars, are explained here.

Cramp balls – presumably they were thought to cure the condition, not cause it – are sometimes also called the coal fungus, of King Alfred’s cakes. They are quite common, as the variant names hints. Whatever their medicinal properties, the dried fungi were used as tinder when starting fires by rubbing sticks or bashing stones together.