Category: David

Compton Park Pool on a sunny, frosty morning. The surface of the water covered by a thin sheet of ice, clear enough to show the pondweed growing below.

Single mushroom of some waxcap species growing on Upper Green, Tettenhall. Just thje slightest trace still remaining of the vivid colours it will have had when it first emerged, not enough to identify it.

Some years ago, there were some parrot waxcaps at precisely the same spot. If this one is the same, the colour must have been lost not only from the cap, but also the stem.

Smestow, crossing the canal below, coming over Dunstall Water Bridge. The fencing visible on the other side of the bridge is an effective barrier to anyone wanting to slip into the racecourse by an unofficial entrance.

Dunnock exploring leaf litter for invertebrates to eat, near the lake in West Park.

Growing on the same dead bough: a jelly fungus, possibly witch’s butter, a feathery carpet of moss, a non-flowering plant, and just a little pale green foliose (leaf-like) lichen. All lichens are composites of two different creatures: one a fungus, the other a photosynthesiser – either an alga or a cyanobacterium.

Reed seed head, backlit in bright winter sunshine. An image almost completely reduced to Shades of grey.