Wolves Wild

Views just outside Pattingham on a misty mid-December morning.

Electricity pylons fading into the distance; trees silhouetted on the skyline, and the rocket-like spire of the parish church.

Golden jelly fungus also goes by a series of other names: witch’s butter, yellow brain fungus, yellow trembler and the linnaean version, Tremella mesenterica.

This pair of fruiting bodies were growing on a twig almost overhanging the footpath across Compton Rough in the Smestow Valley Nature Reserve.

This luxuriant growth on a roadside wild rose bush is a robin’s pincusion. It’s a gall, an abnormal growth caused by a wasp which lays its eggs in the rose’s leaf buds. The gall looked the worse for wear after lots of heavy rain. But it was probably still protecting the wasp larvae due to emerge in the spring.

Delicate umbellifer already putting on its spring growth, beginning to develop a seed head in the middle of December.

King Alfred’s cakes, also known as cramp balls and as the coal fungus. Fairly common, but sometimes similar in colour to the bark of the trees (often dead trees) they grow on, so easily missed. This fungus was used for tinder when lighting fires took real skill.

These were growing on the trunk of a tree, blown down by gales a couple of years ago, at the edge of the Bantock Park Pitch and Putt course. One of the pictures also shows a horses hoof fungus beginning to expand.

Earth stars, fungi which look like nothing on earth. Quite often to be found half-hidden in the vegetation under hedgerows or in undergrowth.

These were the commonest species of the group – collared earth stars.