Wolves Wild

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?

The woody remains of an umbellifer from last summer, standing up in the Paddock in the Smestow Valley Nature Reserve.

A male house sparrow which spent some time eating seeds from a window seed tray.

Robins, house sparrows and a blue tit feeding at a window bird feeding tray. An experiment in slow motion video. Set to show at one quarter speed. Uploaded without a sound track.

An experiment in slow motion. The video was not filmed on a slo-mo setting, just edited as such after the event when it was suggested to me that this might show more detail. It does.

A great spotted woodpecker high in a tree on the edge of Bantock Park. Hard to spot among the maze of branches – the camera also struggled to focus on the bird rather than one or another of the branches. It’s just possible to make out the red patch on the bird’s throat in at least one picture; a mark that it was a male.