Wolves Wild

The squirrels in East Park are a good deal leaner and warier than their pampered, sometimes overweight cousins in Wolverhampton’s other Victorian park.

This one was watching me watching it.

Recently emerged shaggy parasols in East Park.

Like those in West Park at about the same time, these were growing under a patch of conifers.

More of this year’s brown birch boletes.

These had appeared less than a day before they were pictured.

Hawthorn shield bugs are one of the commoner shield bugs. They are seen in the autumn when their preferred food, haws, ripen.

This one was on the leaf of a rose bush. The ones I see never seem to be on hawthorn: in 2010 resting on a wall, and in 2011 on an ivy leaf.

Bracket fungi on a rotten log resting in a pool in Bob’s Brook in the Cotwall End LNR. The pool may be one of the ones created by dams in the brook to make mill ponds when the valley was a hive of mining and quarrying.

The log was too far out to get a clear enough view to identify the fungus species.

Bullrush flower growing close to the footbridge on Wetland Lake.

Tiny flies eating hungrily on Michaelmas daisies on a warm day.

Small group of glistening inkcaps growing through tree litter including a decidedly weathered fallen holly leaf.
The scene made a picture in different shades of the same colour.

One of the flowers on a fuchsia: this one was on the wall of a house on one of the streets by West Park.

West Park as a late September dawn approaches: the Conservatory.

Looking across the boating lake towards the bridge and the sun rising behind the island.

Finally, the Bandstand.

Crab apples ripening on a tree by the stream up close to Himley Hall.

Brown birch boletes are mushrooms with pores rather than gills for shedding their spores. These, growing in the same place, show the range of shades of brown in the caps.

I had noticed them in the same area in 2009 and again in 2011.

Here is one which someone had kindly kicked over, allowing a clearer view of the stem and the pores.