Wolves Wild

Globe water lilies, just as the flowers were beginning to open. These were growing in the slower current at the edge of the Severn, seen from the riverside footpath in the Quarry.

Ladybirds: red with black spots, black with red spots (some of which have another black dot in the middle). They are all the recent interloper, harlequin ladybirds.

A roadside wild poppy, two stems from the same plant, seen at the same time.

One topped by its flower.

On the other, the flower has already done its work. The petals have been shed, the seed-case and its contents are beginning to ripen.

Attingham Hall, with a very extensive park, is a national Trust property near Shrewsbury. In the pasture, not far from a herd of grazing cows and calves, there are two corvids in the grass.

One of the birds – they were rooks – was spending some time feeding the other.

An adult green dock beetle rests on an alkanet leaf. Perhaps one of the pair responsible for producing the mass of voracious young which had been busy stripping nearby dock leaves (yesterday’s post)

The culprits were still hanging around: little black blobs, thier size looking totally disproportionate to the damage they have inflicted on their host and food plant.

The plants were a particularly large-leved variety of dock, the leaves reduced to skeletons by crowds of insects, the juvenile stage of green dock beetles.