The October full moon, a few minutes before it set behind Tettenhall ridge. The October full moon was sometimes actually called the hunters’ moon, following on from September’s harvest moon. The other flowery names which are increasingly bandied about on the internet and elsewhere are from the traditions of some native north Americans, if they are autherntic at all.
A shaggy inkcap mushroom, also called a lawyer’s wig, growing on the lawn outside low-rise flats opposite Bantock Park.
As these and closely related mushrooms shed their spores, their caps disintegrate from the rime (“deliquescing”) to form a black gooey inky mass, which some people can be used to make ink.
Some type of umbellifer, still flowering well into autumn. The flowers themselves, just intruding into shot, were past their best when I spotted the plant, so I focussed on the one which had turned to as yet unripe seed.
Fly agaric mushroom. Its “warts all washed away by heavy rain, as a fly walks along the surface of the cap.
A magpie heads into the cover of the vegetation on Compton Park pond. The laggard of a group of three which had been up to no good on the footbridge, and which fled when I crossed.
Every year, ten or so shovellers gather on West Park lake for a cosy berth through the winter. The first of this year’s arrived in mid-October. This male, just coming out of eclipse plumage, was busy with the shoveller habit of swimming round in a tight circle with its beak just below the surface of the water, shovelling for food.