Category: David

An adult green dock beetle rests on an alkanet leaf. Perhaps one of the pair responsible for producing the mass of voracious young which had been busy stripping nearby dock leaves (yesterday’s post)

The culprits were still hanging around: little black blobs, thier size looking totally disproportionate to the damage they have inflicted on their host and food plant.

The plants were a particularly large-leved variety of dock, the leaves reduced to skeletons by crowds of insects, the juvenile stage of green dock beetles.

Like yesterday’s horse chestnut, hawthorns also have some variant trees which procuce a red rather than a white flower. This one was by the river in Shrewsburry.

One of the adult swans preening as it guards the nest with young cygnets at the edge of the Severn at Shrewsbury. We couldn’t spot the other parent then, but when we passed by the next day, both birds were there.

Picture taken while looking down from English Bridge.

Views looking in a downstream direction from the old bridge (now a footbridge) over the Severn at Atcham, near Shrewsbury.

The two distant hills are the Lawley (on the right) and Caer Caradoc, the church in apparent alignment with the gap between them at Condover as far as I can work out.

A rustic sailor beetle. This one was resting on an alkanet leaf by the Severn at Shrewsbury. There were several insects on each leaf of the plant, most of them mayflies.