Category: David

California poppy escaping from a front garden, growing at the inner edge of the pavement.

Bees busy making the best of the sunny weather, out gathering pollen.

Looks like there’s going to be a good crop of haws this year, and seem to be ripening early.

Berries beginning to ripen while the flowers were still out nearby on a white dogwood bush in a front garden.

Sow thistles can often be spotted at the garden wall edge of pavements in the suburbs, where they can get towards a couple of feet tall. This one was growing rooted in the mortar half way up a garden wall, looking healthy despite a stem only a few inches long.

This coot and its mate, which was swimming just out of shot, were the first to have chicks hatch this year. The chicks are now long gone.

A cluster of glistening inkcaps growing on wood chip mulch in a front garden. The caps of these mushrooms do indeed sometimes glisten, but not when these pictures were taken.

A young rat in West Park dragging something several times its own length. Not sure what it was, but the rat was very determined to drag it along, and eventually made the security of some shrubbery.

The same boletes growing by forcing their way through the tarmac of a pavement as in a recent post. Here seen on a revisit four days later, with one of the mushrooms greatly enlarged.

Tiny garden snail, no more that a quarter inch across, which had somehow taken up residence on the inside of a recycling bin.

Growing after forcing their way through the tarmac of a pavement, a pair of boletes, possibly suede boletes.

The two residential gull species on the lake at West Park. Black-headed gulls, currently lacking the black head of the breeding plumage, swimming by in the foreground. Meanwhile, a juvenile lesser black backed gull looms behind them as it stands on a fallen bough.