Wildlife from Wolverhampton and nearby
Like most high places, its usually windy near the top of the Malvern Hills, even when the breeze seems gentle at lower levels. Rippling waves in the long grass were hypnotic.
The few bushes above the tree line take on the characteristic bending before the wind form.
The caps of yellow fieldcap mushrooms are indeed a bright yellow when they first emerge, but the colour fades as the cap spreads to its full width.
Holm oak: this specimen one of the fine collection of mature trees in the churchyard of Great Malvern Priory.
A small group of lacy phacella flowering in the grass by the riverside footpath in Worcester. On one of the flowers, seaching out the pollen, a spotted longhorn Rutpela maculata
Dryad’s saddles, bracket fungi, seem to be popping up all over the place at the moment. Here were several mature specimens on the trunk of one of the trees by the road leading up Happy Valley, heading up the hills from Great Malvern. Fresher ones, most not yet their full size, on a tree on the bank of the Severn in Worcester.
A small copper butterfly on the lower slopes of Worcestershire Beacon in the Malvern Hills, resting with its wings open on a nettle leaf as it warms itself in morning sunlight.