One of nature’s standard colour-coded warnings: black and yellow stripes equals danger. This scarlet tiger moth doesn’t sting. The coarse bristles probably already make it unpleasant to eat. Anything which tries to eat it anyway would get bigger problems. The caterpillar is poisonous.
In close-up view, the tiny seeds in the inside of a red pepper remind me of nothing so much as rows of standing stones.
I was trying to get a picture of the willow catkins in the foreground, using a mobile phone camera. Instead it’s a portrait of an intricate maze, with the tangle of branches from the other trees behind.
Possibly a layered cup fungus (Peziza varia, also sometimes called cellar cup fungus) growing in a leaky shed.
A maple, just as the leaves were starting to open. The tree was growing by the road and the canal at Newbridge. As I stood on the bridge, the branch was at eye level.
The Two Greens pub in Tettenhall (formerly the Rock) has good views looking towards Wolverhampton. Here, through a gap in the trees, Compton Park with the Wolves indoor training ground, before the land rises behind.
It’s been a cold and damp spring so far, not exactly insect-friendly conditions. Here’s one ladybird which braved the weather, taking a rest on a spiky thistle.
Bluebells growing in a front garden, with the first signs of the flowers beginning to develop, and just peeping through the leaves. They did get bluer later.
A breeze was making the plant sway, so I didn’t try to get any nearer than enough to take a medium close-up picture of of this flowering current (ribes) bush. Even so, there’s a little bit of movement blur.
It’s early spring, so the blackthorn bushes are putting out their flowers before there’s any sign of leaf. Hawthorns, meanwhile, are beginning to develop their leaves, which will be fully open before the flower buds even start to develop.
Patches of tiny white flowers growing within inches of the road, Danish scurvy grass is a halophile (salt lover). It now grows where briny splashes from winter gritting land anywhere it can put down roots.
Up to the 1960s it was found in Britain, but only as a rare plant growing right by the sea. But gritting roads began to be done more systematically, and the slipstreams created in the growing of traffic helped spread the seeds of the plant, which is now common in early spring.
During the first COVID lockdown, four (!) years ago, urban wildlife got much more confident. I took these pictures just a couple of weeks after the restrictions were brought in, but I’m just getting round to uploading them. This robin was getting ready to burst forth on a display song, undisturbed by me sitting just a few feet away in the spring sunshine.