Wolves Wild

Teazles: plants with serious defences built in. The flowers are spiky. The leaves are spiky. The stems are spiky.

I was taking a few pictures of what I thought were water boatmen (in fact they were actually backswimmers) on the surface of the pond in Compton Park. Then I noticed a couple of small fish swimming near the surface of the water.

When I got the pictures home and looked at them on a bigger screen, it turned out that there weren’t any fish. Instead they were young newts, and different species of newts at that. One was a smooth newt, the other a palmate newt.

A male azure blue damselfly hovers, clasping a female just behind her head, in preparation for mating. Then the pair take off. The final picture in the sequence was the only one I managed with the air in the air. Most of their bodies were hidden behind the leaf of a read, but it’s just possible to make out that the female hadn’t yet curled round her abdomen to form the so-called heart configuration. Then they moved off deeper into the vegetation.

A purple tinge to the flowers of a yarrow. This seems to be particularly noticeable in yarrows this year.

A moth at rest, its wings spread out on a plastic garden chair. It’s possibly a small dusty wave.

The swan family on West Park lake still have all five cygnets. They seem to be growing really quickly, and to be ever-hopeful of being fed.