David

A heron has been perched in the same willow on the West Park lake island for several days recently. This time, I visited the park in the early afternoon. The heron was there once again, this time asleep, or giving a veryu good impression of sleeping.

Not a fungus which immediately leaps to the eye. White spindle looks like short stalks, sometimes gnarly or bifurcating. It’s usually just about visible peeking out between the leaves of short grass, and it’s another one I’m noticing more of this year.

These were growing on different lawns at waist level, so I didn’t need to lie down to get these pictures.

A comma butterfly, one of the autumn generation, resting in the sun on a bramble leaf. It was warming up before heading off to feed on the ivy flowers nearby,

A groups of boletes, possibly suede boletes, growing in short grass under trees by the side of Clark Road.

A horse chestnut in West Park. I didn’t get up close enough to see if the leaf colour had changed for autumn, or whether it was the blight which nowadays turns these leaves brown in late summer.

What attracted me was less the tree, than its contrast with the strips worn by the teams playing football. Even before I got to that part of the park, the match was making its presence felt. There were a few spectators, and I’ve never come across a more enthusiastic group at a weekend football in the park match before.

The blusher is another mushroom species which seems to be popping up all over the place this autumn. Their size, shape and warty caps immediately mark them as an allied species to fly agarics. They don’t have such a distinctive colour, but their size still makes them quite easy to spot.

These are from several different locations: lawns in front gardens, by roadsides, Bantock Park.

At the back of Tettenhall church, a steep ramp and steps lead to the streets behind the Upper Green. At the top of the steps, a block of flats has a large lawn, at perhaps waist level, with some mature trees. Some autumns, this lawn supports various kinds of mushrooms.

This is a birch bolete, sometimes called brown birch boletes. It’s one of those fungi which is only found in association with one type of tree: birch in this case, of course.

More pictures of a selection of the Japanese acers in West Park as their leaves turn permutations of red, yellow, orange and purple (!) for autumn. To see how much the colours can change in a week or so, earlier pictures of the first two trees in this set can be seen here.

A quiet residential street, with a jay investigating one of the lawns, then flying onto the roof of the house when disturbed. As is the way when there’s just a fleeting opportunity, I had the wrong lens on the camera.

In Bantock Park, there’s a row of conifers and silver birches on the edge of the pitch and putt course. Most autumns, the area round these trees is good for mushrooms, with several different species including fly agarics.

This year has been quite a good one. The mushroom in these pictures was growing under the same tree as some fly agarics. The warty appearance marked it as some kind of agaric. The domed cap, looking very like a golf ball from a distance, meant it had probably emerged during the previous night.

This was pure white all over. Fly agarics have bright red caps, fading to orange after heavy rain. The white flecks on fly agaric caps are the remains of the veil which protected it when it was forcing its way through the soil. So our pure white mushroom must be a different, much rarer species.

Another visit to the park four or five days later ended such speculations. The mushroom had grown to its full size. As the cap expanded and flattened, the veil had now broken, revealing the red below.