Wolves Wild

Three families of greylag geese with goslings in West Park this year. The goslings in the different families at different ages, but when they come ashore the adults often bring them together so they can share lookout duty.

When I first spotted them, the goslings were feeding among daisies in one of the patches of short grass near the lake. For reasons which weren’t clear to me, the adults decided to herd them nearer to the lake, and incidentally a little closer to where I was standing. I thought they were heading for the safety of the water. Instead, they stopped part way across the path. The goslings got themselves settled, and started hunting the cracks in the path for morsels to eat.

A red mason bee (not looking noticably red from this angle) busily eating at the blue flower of an alkanet.

Female orange tip butterflies can be recognised by the wings which don’t have an orange tip. Here’s one feeding on the flower or a jack by the hedge. Some weeks later, evidence appeared that she may also have been laying eggs at the same time.

Glistening inkcaps grow in dense clusters on dead wood. As they shed their spores they deliquesce: the caps disintegrate into a slimy mess from the rim. The colour of the remaining fungus also changes from a bright tan to a dull grey-brown.

Comma butterfly standing on the edge of a damp patch in an area of bare soil. Its proboscis was extended; I think it was sucking moisture from the damp patch.

The first set of West Park coot chicks which hatched this year. I’d seen one of them in the water a few days earlier, but it looked like it had been touching the nest the whole time before it climbed back in. This time two of them were a bit more venturesome. The parents were watchful, but not to the point of exercising close supervision.

After a while, they climbed back home.