Wolves Wild

Magpies gathering in twos or in small groups high in trees, visible while the branches are still bare of leaves. They may be pairing up rather that surveying their territories.

A tree fallen across the Smestow Brook at Newbridge. Growing from the trunk, directly over the stream, a second generation of fungi. They are velvet shanks.

A male blackbird on the ground in the Paddock, Smestow Valley Nature Reserve. It was the proverbial early bird which had got the worm, and was busy eating it.

In a couple of the the pictures, little bits of bright red can be seen in the short grass. Not carelessly discarded litter, they mark more of the scarlet elf cups.

Butterbur in the Smestow Valley Nature Reserve, and nearby along the bank of the canal, just starting to flower earlier this month. Not much further south, in Stratford on Avon, it was flowering over Christmas, and has now completely gone over.

I had thought I might have been too late for the scarlet elf cup season when I went looking for them mid-February. I did find some that day. This is just a small sample of the many elf cups we found on a revisit almost a fortnight later.

As we went into the Smestow Valley Nature Reserve, we found that several of the mature trees lining the Railway Walk opposite Cupcake Lane had been felled between our two visits. This left a new open space along the embankment by the Railway Walk, but had also resulted in clearing away a lot of undergrowth on the footpath along the Smestow  Brook. That revealed a first area with patches of elf cups which had previously been completely hidden by undergrowth and detritus.

As we walked the full length of the Paddock, there were more and more elf cups between the footpath and the Smestow, and smaller numbers on the other side of the path.

At Meccano Bridge, we came down to canal level. As we returned towards Newbridge, there were a lot of patches of elf cups on the embankment which separates the canal from the Smestow. In the course of a short walk, we trhink it’s likely we got to see over a thousand of these fruiting bodies altogether.

Lords and ladies (also called wild arum and too many other names to bother listing) normally thrive in woodland. Like other flowers which prefer this environment, such as bluebells, they get their main growth and their flowering over early in the year, before the trees have grown the leaves which grab all the sunlight, leaving ground level in permanent semi-shadow.

Quite often the leaves of lords and ladies have this black mottled effect. A quick web search showed just about every web page about the plant mentioning this effect, but none giving any hint about the cause. Is it natural variation, or perhaps the result of a common viral infection?