Wolves Wild

Some of the trees right by Bantock House as they began to change colour recently, spotted on the same day as the trees in the picture posted yesterday.

Waxcaps are small, often brightly coloured mushrooms. The blackening waxcap is yellow at first, and gradually turns completely black.

The change in colour has only just begun in the first mushroom – at the peak of the cap and where a section of the rim has been nibbled. The other, pictured at the same time, is already somewhat darker.

Sulfur tufts are distinctive all-yellow mushrooms which grow, usually in clumps, on wood which is rotting underground: normally the roots of former trees.

All the mushrooms shown here are still young. They probably only grew in the night before the pictures were taken.

I had a stroll round Bantock Park recently, looking for trees turning the colours of autumn. These caught my eye, growing on the opposite side of Finchfield Road.

Ivy starts to flower in October, when most other plants have given over blooming.

The flowers attract large numbers of feeding insects, especially on sunny autumn days.

The insects are so fixated on their tasks that they can be approached quite closely. It’s possible to get photos which show details such as the transparent wings and hairy legs and body of this bee.

The bee may have just set out for the day: there are only a couple of grains of pollen sticking to its body.

The spectacular red or ripening vibernum berries. I took this picture with a wide-angle lens almost touching the main subject, to produce an exaggerated perspective of the other berries and the reddening leaves on the rest of the bush.