David

A red mason bee (not looking noticably red from this angle) busily eating at the blue flower of an alkanet.

Female orange tip butterflies can be recognised by the wings which don’t have an orange tip. Here’s one feeding on the flower or a jack by the hedge. Some weeks later, evidence appeared that she may also have been laying eggs at the same time.

Glistening inkcaps grow in dense clusters on dead wood. As they shed their spores they deliquesce: the caps disintegrate into a slimy mess from the rim. The colour of the remaining fungus also changes from a bright tan to a dull grey-brown.

Comma butterfly standing on the edge of a damp patch in an area of bare soil. Its proboscis was extended; I think it was sucking moisture from the damp patch.

The first set of West Park coot chicks which hatched this year. I’d seen one of them in the water a few days earlier, but it looked like it had been touching the nest the whole time before it climbed back in. This time two of them were a bit more venturesome. The parents were watchful, but not to the point of exercising close supervision.

After a while, they climbed back home.

Scarlet tiger moth caterpillars crawling on the leaves of alkanet plants. The yellow and black stripes are a warning to predators such as birds with hungry young chicks: beware, we are toxic. The stiff hairs along their bodies are for the same effect.

Shown in some of the pictures are blobs which show the caterpillars use the leaves not just as support and food source, but also as their toilet.