Wolves Wild

Lesser celandines flowering at a sheltered spot by the Staffs & Worcs canal. Both pictures were taken on cool, cloudy days, the bottom shot a couple of days before the other one.

Not actually wildlife, but the work which goes on to maintain the places we use where wildlife also thrives, here the canals.

All the lock gates on the British Waterways system are built at a workshop at the end of the Bradley arm of the Birmingham canal, which now leads only to that workshop, though it was on the original, Brindley, main line.

The workshop had an open day recently. These pictures were taken then.

The early morning mist was very dense: the tree was perhaps twenty yards away, with the canal directly behind it.

All images from the same small pond featured on Tuesday.

A water snail between two recently hatched tadpoles.

Water snails

More water snails, feeding on the build-up on the pond lining.

Snails feeding on frogspawn or the nearby vegetation.

Tadpoles, spawn and snails.

The pollen only appears on male trees. Once it appears the flowers have gone beyond the bud stage which looks a little like fur and gives the tree its name.

Inkcaps are a set of mushroom species which shed their spores by deliquescing – it appears their caps are disintegrating into a black, sometimes gooey, mess. Different sections of these clumps of glistening inkcaps were showing different stages along that process. The most recent fungi in the foreground above, though towards almost complete disintegration to the left of the third picture.