Wolves Wild

Shovellers seem to spend almost all their time in the water. Usually they are swimming round in tight circles, filtering the water just below the surface for food. When they take a break, it’s by relaxing and floating where they are.

For once, this pair of shovellers had climbed onto a fallen bough. They were standing one-legged; their necks turned so their heads were resting on their backs. Their eyes were open, or at least the eyes visible from the shore were. But they may still have been asleep: a neat duck trick.

Japanese quince, a shrub where the bright red flowers make a nice early spring contrast with the equally bright green of the leaves. These were by the West Park perimeter footpath.

I like taking pictures of fungi. They don’t flee if I get too close: creatures which don’t flee when I get too close are likely to attack instead. Even worse. They don’t move unpredictably when there’s even the slightest breeze, like many plants.

Admittedly, they are often hard to get a good view of: hiding where there’s not much light, half-hidden in vegetal detritus in an overgrown patch of rough ground. But they have an incredible variety of shapes and textures, and sometimes colours which cannot be seen anywhere else in the natural world. And once in a while they’re just a slightly twisted variation on a standard mushroomy shape, with colours which are bland. Lo, scurfy twiglets, Tubaria furfuracea.

Broad-leaved stonecrop is a popular ground-cover succulent, especially in rock gardens. A front garden with beds at waist height by the pavement meant I was able to use the macro setting on a mobile’s camera to get these close-ups, with water left after overnight rain reflecting off the fleshy leaves.

Yet another fungus I noticed but didn’t inspect closely enough to identify properly. It may be one of the twiglet group (more formally the Tubaria genus.

Dog’s mercury, another plant which gets its growing season and its flowering season done early in the year, before it is overshadowed by the leaf canopy above. These were growing in the hedgerow by the canal footpath at Compton, and the flowers were just starting to open.