More seed heads on the remains of tall stalks from last years plant growth. These are bullrushes, with seed heads opened up by the pecking of birds hunting the seeds, now partly dispersed by the wind.
Like yesterday’s teazles, these bullrushes are among the more successful plants in the wetland area in and around the Compton Park pond.
Carrion crows searching the frozen ground of West Park for something to eat. The pictures have caught the four birds which were closest together. There were at least as many others spread across the field. All were finding something, but I was too far away to see what.
Seed heads from last year’s teazles, spiked for protection, hooked on the end to catch in fur or feathers to ensure the seed is dispersed far from the mother plant.
These are from some of the teazles which are thriving in the small wetland area which has been created in a corner of Compton Park.
There’s a white goose – a feral farmyard goose – which has been living on West Park lake for some time.
It doesn’t keep company with the greylag geese, although they are the same size it is, and the two types form a mixed and interbreeding block at, for example, the Severn at Bridgnorth. Nor does it hang around with the much more numerous and somewhat larger Canada geese.
Instead, it spends some time trying to latch on to swans, white-feathered like itself, but significantly larger than any of the geese. The swans, in their turn, seem just to ignore their follower.
Lightly dusted with frost crystals, leaves on two of the fatsia bushes in West Park earlier this month.
A pair of carrion crows were walking on the ice on West Park lake. I originally got the camera out because the one farther from the shore was occasionally slipping and sliding.
But as I began to take pictures, it stopped walking, and instead began to peck vigorously at the ice. I thought it had pecked its way through to the water below, and was eating something it had noticed at the ice / water interface. Looking at these pictures, I’m less sure. It was eating something. But that may have been some of the fragments of ice which its pecking had created, or perhaps a morsel which had been frozen into the ice.