Wolves Wild

Ribwort plantain, the flowers on one plant as they began to open. Pictres taken the beginning and end of the same week.

It seems that for weeks, I’ve been checking the usual ponds for frogspawn when I was passing, without result.

Then over the Easter weekend, it seemed like there were sounds of frog mating calls all over the place. Loud croaking by ponds, and by the canal out Castlecroft way, but no actual sightings.

On Easter Monday, lots of spawn on Willow Pond. I think frogs’, not from newts which are also recorded as breeding there.

The bluebells were at there height in the week after Easter. Most of these were in the woods around Worfield. But a couple of the pictures are from the Railway Walk between Compton and Finchfield; these might include the odd garden escape Spanish bluebell.

The first comma butterfly that stayed still long enough for me to get its picture this year. It was resting on the ground, spreading its wings to warm up in the sun.

Some years, the flowering of all the blackthorns is synchronised. Blackthorn hedges briefly look, from a distance, like they are covered in some kind of white foam.

In other years, like this one, the process is more spread out. Some sections of hedges like the one in the Barley Field will be fully out, while other sections have buds which are just developing.

These pictures are all from that hedge in the Barley Field, and cover just over one week in April.

A couple of strolls recently along the bridleway by the side of the Pool Hall Fisheries, with no sign of the great crested grebes which used to breed there every year. Perhaps they had been disturbed by the latest device being used by one of the anglers (pictured below), which showed clearly as it crossed the water.

Walking on a little further, however, meant we did spot a pair of the grebes on the nearby private angling pool of the J.Sankey company at Dimmingsdale. As we watched from a vantage point on the canal towpath, the pair spent most of their time on or near a nest under a willow. Occasionally, one or both of them ventured out into open water to fish.