Category: David

Male blackbird using a garden fence as a vantage point. When it noticed my attention, it retreated behind a tree while keeping on watch.

A small patch of white violets in a quiet corner of the Castle Ground Park, Bridgnorth. I didn’t get close enough to smell them.

Tawny mining bee (Andrena fulva), quite common during the flowering season for fruit trees such as apple, pear, plum and cherry. They are solitary, and “mine” in the sense that they dig holes for their homes. Can sometimes be spotted emerging from lawns, playing fields, grassy banks and the like.

When the pond in Compton Park was created some years ago, the water and the surrounding marshy area were planted with a variety of wildflowers.

Marsh marigolds are one of the species which has thrived in the water. They are too far out from dry land (the wooden footbridge) to get up close, and quite hemmed in by the forest of bulrushes, so I needed a fairly long focal length to get these pictures.

In flight, it looked like a bee and sounded like a bee. At rest, or perhaps sunbathing, it looked to the naked eye like a bee with something sticking to it.

With the magnification of a photo, the “something sticking to it” proved to be a single pair of wings sticking out from the body, when resting bees’ wings are folded back along the abdomen. So it’s a fly; specifically a dark-edged bee fly (Bombylius major)

The small pond at Bantock Park, with the marsh marigolds on its margin fully opened. In the background, Bantock House.