Category: David

Iris flowering in a front garden early this month. All that’s left now of the flowers is a few brown and shrivelled fragments.

The popularity of bay as garden bushes probably owes more to the use of the leaves as a herb than to any features of the flowers. They are small, grow in clusters and are not, to my nose at any rate, strongly perfumed.

An alder leaf beetle on a leaf. I didn’t take much notice what kind of leaf it was on, but it definitely wasn’t an alder.

One of the many rats living in West Park, half-emerging from under the bush which quite likely is over its rat-hole. It was manipulating something (I couldn’t see what) with its front paws, then nibbling at it.

A face-off between two of the West Park coots, while a third looked on intently. Presumably the two birds adopting a threat posture were rival males, with an interloper getting too close to the other’s mate.

The threats didn’t develop into actual contact: that can look quite nasty with coots, deploying their vicious-looking feet as well as beaks. The onlooker eventually turned round and started swimming away. The other pair lost eye contact, and headed for well-separated parts of the bank to climb on land and walk off ignoring each other.

Male blackbird among the thick vegetation around the edge of the pond at Bantock Park. Traces of soil on his beak show traces of his efforts to probe the soft ground of the shoreline for creatures to eat, or perhaps to take back to the nest.