Red admiral butterfly using its long tongue to feed on ivy flowers.
Ivy usually flowers from mid-October into November, attracting loads of insects because there are very few other flowers in autumn.
This year, flowers started to appear before the end of September.
Japanese knotweed: originally introduced as an ornamental; easily spread and tough to eradicate, a pernicious weed.
This one, now going to seed, is growing in the same spot by the Smestow Brook as the flowering one featured previously.
Weeping polypore, a bracket fungus, growing near the base of an oak tree right by the stile connecting Baggeridge Country Park to the grounds of Himley Hall.
This specimen looked worn enough to have been around for a while. It was still exuding liquid, though not as obviously as a fresher one.
More small inkcaps deliquescing, this time in the grounds of Himley Hall.
Yew berries ripening on the same tree in Albrighton churchyard which featured in the previous post.
Photos taken at the same time, but these berries were on the south-facing side of the tree.
Unripe yew berries half-hidden behind a whitened old spider’s web.
Magpie standing on a set of floodlights, looking out for threats – or victims.
Bright red and slimy waxcap growing under the grass in East Park. Waxcaps are a genus of mushrooms which grow less than an inch tall, but often have bright colours.
This one was probably a so-called scarlet hood, though there other, less common, ones with a similar colour.
Developing cones on a tree in East Park. I think the blue-green needles are also new growth.
Not something I notice very often: a pair of insects mating.
These were hoverflies, specifically sun flies, on a hawthorn leaf in the sun.
Inkcaps are a group of mushroom species which shed their spores not through gills or pores, but by their caps deliquescing – disintegrating, as was well under way here.
