Seed heads from last year’s teazles, spiked for protection, hooked on the end to catch in fur or feathers to ensure the seed is dispersed far from the mother plant.
These are from some of the teazles which are thriving in the small wetland area which has been created in a corner of Compton Park.
There’s a white goose – a feral farmyard goose – which has been living on West Park lake for some time.
It doesn’t keep company with the greylag geese, although they are the same size it is, and the two types form a mixed and interbreeding block at, for example, the Severn at Bridgnorth. Nor does it hang around with the much more numerous and somewhat larger Canada geese.
Instead, it spends some time trying to latch on to swans, white-feathered like itself, but significantly larger than any of the geese. The swans, in their turn, seem just to ignore their follower.
Lightly dusted with frost crystals, leaves on two of the fatsia bushes in West Park earlier this month.
A pair of carrion crows were walking on the ice on West Park lake. I originally got the camera out because the one farther from the shore was occasionally slipping and sliding.
But as I began to take pictures, it stopped walking, and instead began to peck vigorously at the ice. I thought it had pecked its way through to the water below, and was eating something it had noticed at the ice / water interface. Looking at these pictures, I’m less sure. It was eating something. But that may have been some of the fragments of ice which its pecking had created, or perhaps a morsel which had been frozen into the ice.
A heavy overnight frost decorates the leaves on the ground, whether they are the ones which fell last autumn, or the fresh ones from new growth anticipating the arrival of spring.
The skeletal remains of last year’s plants, still standing as the first signs of the new year’s growth are showing. These knapweeds and meadowsweets are among the flora which have established themselves around the Compton Park pond.