Category: David

On several recent visits to West Park, I’ve noticed a swan on the same patch of the shore of West Park’s boating lake island, always industriously preening. Usually there is another swan offshore, patrolling the area.

Possibly they are the swan pair which had been mating in the water nearby earlier, now getting ready to occupy the patch for their nest.

Two or even three other pairs of mature swans are acting as if they are staking claims at other points near the edge of this or the other island as nesting spots. The park might just be getting a bumper crop of cygnets for 2017.

Very active little grebe diving as it hunted for fish. This one was swimming in the canal in the shadow of the Wildside Centre.

Among the devastation caused by last month’s Storm Doris was more trees brought down than by normal winter gales. Here the remains of an oak tree in West Park, pulled up near the top of its roots. Not far away, just outside the park, a large old poplar had failed at something over head height, the thick trunk snapped like a matchstick.

Dunnock in the bird feeding area at Northycote Farm, caught at an instant where it seemed to be paying more attention to the camera pointed at it that to the scraps of food it was looking for on the ground.

At Castlecroft, the course of the former Wolverhampton and Kingswinford Railway crosses the city boundary, and the Smestow Valley Railway Walk becomes the South Staffordshire Railway Walk. The first section of the path on the Staffodshire side is a long cutting, nowadays well wooded.

It’s always being on the look out for fungi in this cutting, whatever the time of year. I noticed what appeared to be a lone scarlet elf cup on the slope not far from the path – actually there were other fruiting bodies, almost completely hidden as they had grown under fallen leaves.

Four sows at Northycote Farm, enthusiastically rooting in the same small patch of mud where some food had evidently got buried.