Wolves Wild

Yellow archangel, yet another of the plants of the woodland floor which gets its flowering season over early, before the trees have grown they kleaves above to capture all the sunlight.

A scene from modern farming. A tractor ploughs a field at Wyken, spraying the freshly ploughed soil with, let’s call it liquid manure. The plough was being followed by a flock of the rooks which nest nearby. A couple of jackdaws were getting in on the act, as well.

This is just the sort of scene which used to form a standard illustration in books about nature for young children, and may well still be so for all I know.

Winter purslane. It’s native on the western side of the Americas, where it’s alternatively known as miners lettuce or Indian lettuce, so presumably considered edible, at least at a pinch.

Flowering as it grew by a roadside at Worfield, so presumably a garden escape.

The West Park turtle has woken from its log winter sleep, somewhere in the mud of the lake. It’s now back sunning itself on one of the fallen boughs by one of the islands.

It doesn’t move very much. To try to get even a little variety in these pictures, it took it while standing at slightly different places on the shore.

A patch of red dead nettle in Worfield.

The plant looks quite like nettles, but is unrelated.

It’s “dead” only in the sense that it isn’t a nettle, so it soesn’t sting.

The growing leaves and the flowers are, at least in my opinion, a lot closer to being purple than red.

A holly blue butterfly resting with its wings folded on bare earth. Holly blues always seem to fold their wings at rest, at least when I see them. Don’t think I’ve ever managed to get a picture showing the brighter blue of the upper surface of the ing.