David

Many of the squirrels in West Park are now so used to being fed that they solicit food. This one has learnt that sitting up and begging can be an effective technique.

Discarded hazelnut shells rest on the GWR blue bricks opposite the one-time Tettenhall railway station, now the Smestow Valley Reserve Ranger Station.

Grey squirrels eat the hazelnuts while they are still green. In the long term this threatens that hazels might die out in the wild in Britain.

This is probably the largest of the caterpillars which featured in last week’s post: this picture was taken 36 hours later than those.
Drops of water sticking to some of the creature’s hairs are the remnants of overnight rain.

Fairiesbonnets are tiny inkcap mushrooms – less than a centimeter high. They grow in troops.

These two troops give some idea of the range of colour. The pictures were taken at the same time; the troops were only a couple of feet away from each other, just inside West Park’s South Gate.

This picture shows all but a few stragglers of the patch with the paler coloured variant (middle photo).

Blushing rosette, or Abortiporus biennis to give their official name, is very strange even for a fungus. 

They grow on buried wood, and are very variable in form and especially in colour. This can vary from near-white, through yellow and red (hence “blushing”), to browns like this one.

I saw this one (or is it these?) growing on one of the patches of short grass just by an entrance to West Park.

This rook was searching among the short grass in front of Exeter cathedral for anything to eat.

It didn’t seem to be at all worried by people who were walking just a few yards away.

The sloe crop has been very sparse this year. These were ripening growing on a blackthorn in a field boundary hedge.

Robin’s pincushion galls also go by several other names, including rose galls.

The insect whose young cause the growth choose dog roses for preference: the “Robin” refers not to the bird, but the folkloric Robin Goodfellow.

Some summer flowers carry on blooming well into September. These poppies were still in flower in the middle of the month, a couple of years back.

Cones on one of the West Park larches, just beginning to ripen. The cones are large, so the tree may be a non-native species.