Wolves Wild

Fruit on a mahonia bush, changing colour from green to blue as it ripens in the spring after the plant’s midwinter flowering.

Mallard and her two ducklings on West Park lake, seen twenty-four hours later than in this set of pictures.

Green-veined white butterfly, feeding on bugloss flowers in someone’s front garden. Looks very similar to a small white, especially when the underside of the wings is rarely visible, as with this one.

The bright yellow of the buds and opening flowers of one of the azalea bushes in West Park recently.

A sign that spring is giving way to summer: damselflies and dragonflies appearing over the Compton Park pool.

This is a male broad bodied chaser dragonfly which was there yesterday. Once the sun comes out, it spends a lot of its time resting on vegetation, on the look out for passing females and for incursions into its territory from rival males.

Coot chick, already put on quite a bit of weight since it came from its egg. It still had traces of the orange feathers on its crown, and it was still bothering its parent for food rather than feeding itself.

Chicken of the woods fungus growing on the trunk of a tree which has fallen over the water from one of the West Park lake islands.

Purple flowers on a tree (a calpurnia perhaps) growing outside the West Park Conservatory.

Daisies seemed to be carpeting all the lawn areas of West Park in the middle of this month. This lone gosling was eating either the short grass or other things it found in the grass. It was surrounded by the daisies, and closely guarded by both parent birds.

Pale pink and dark blue flowers, not one of the conventional colour pairings, and works all the better for that. Flowers on a ceanothus bush with a clematis climbing over it, in a front garden I pass on the way to the shops.

Unidentified beetle or similar insect on a wall, its black colour overlaid with a shifting iridescent blue.

The first I’v seen of this year’s crop of young birds on the West Park lake – a mallard with her two ducklings. The young birds looked so small and fluffy I thought they were less than a day old. But they looked no different twenty-four hours later (pictures soon).