Category: David

Peacock butterfly caterpillars on their preferred food plant, nettles. Their backs are covered in hairs and spikes, in a probably not entirely successful measure to try to make them unpalatable to hungry birds.

Bog cotton (cottongrass) growing in a normally marshy area of Sutton Park. The white, fluffy seed heads look like miniature cotton bolls.

One of the moorhens on the Compton Park pool laboriously climbed up towards the top of a patch of bullrushes. Once it got there, it started enthusiastically eating the flowers, getting its beak and some of its feathers covered in pollen.

Pasqueflower seed head in a Bridgnorth garden – probably developing from one of the flowers in this post.

Both swan parents with the same set of cygnets featured in a post yesterday. These pictures were taken a fortnight later.

All six cygnets first seen when recently hatched were still thriving when these pictures were taken, and when I’ve been back to the park more recently.

Seeing the open flowers makes it easy to tell how the poached egg plat gets its name.