Wolves Wild

The bridge or aqueduct carrying the water of the Smestow Brook over the Staffs & Worcs Canal.

The lighting emphasised the texture of the feathers of this carrion crow as it stalked through low vegetation in the Sandwell Valley Nature Reserve.

Danish scurvy grass is a tiny, inconspicuous spring flowering plant. Despite the name, it is native to Britain. But until recent decades it only grew in a few sea-splashed areas, because it is a halophile, or salt-loving plant.

Since the 1960s it has spread along roads which are regularly gritted in winter, its seeds carried by the slipstream of passing traffic. It is usually found now where there are grassy verges close enough to get splashed by the surface water from main roads. These were at a safer viewing spot on the edge of the village green at Seisdon.

Towards the end of February, the flowers were just beginning to open.

A mixed group of redwings and fieldfares were resting high up in a tree by the canal towpath. Just after I got this picture, they were disturbed by someone walking a dog. The redwings flew off in one direction, the fieldfares in another.

Heron hunting, mid-February, standing on a footpath leading past a small pond near the Handsworth Wood end of Sandwell Valley.

The breeding season was fast approaching. The bird didn’t have the long feathers down its front and the behind its head, so it may have been a juvenile.

Black-headed gulls standing on successive posts of a fence in the flooded area of a field bordering the Pool Hall fishing lake.