Wolves Wild

Being half-hidden in grass hadn’t protected these fly agaric mushrooms from being eaten.

This dragonfly landed on the parapet of the bridge which carries Castlecroft Road over the Smestow Valley Railway walk just as I was taking the pictures which featured in the previous post.

It didn’t seem at all worried as I turned my camera in its direction and took a series of pictures.

Distorted acorns produced when a tiny wasp lays her egg in them.

Growing on one of the oak trees by the Smestow Valley Railway Walk, right by Castlecroft Road. The view from the bridge put me on the level with the acorns.

According to sources elsewhere on the web, there are occasional years where these galls are very common. I don’t remember ever having seen them before. As far as I could see, every acorn on that oak was affected. I’ve been looking round at other local oak trees since, any not seen any more of these galls – though I haven’t seen many normal-looking acorns either.

Some of the trees right by Bantock House as they began to change colour recently, spotted on the same day as the trees in the picture posted yesterday.

Waxcaps are small, often brightly coloured mushrooms. The blackening waxcap is yellow at first, and gradually turns completely black.

The change in colour has only just begun in the first mushroom – at the peak of the cap and where a section of the rim has been nibbled. The other, pictured at the same time, is already somewhat darker.

Sulfur tufts are distinctive all-yellow mushrooms which grow, usually in clumps, on wood which is rotting underground: normally the roots of former trees.

All the mushrooms shown here are still young. They probably only grew in the night before the pictures were taken.

I had a stroll round Bantock Park recently, looking for trees turning the colours of autumn. These caught my eye, growing on the opposite side of Finchfield Road.

Ivy starts to flower in October, when most other plants have given over blooming.

The flowers attract large numbers of feeding insects, especially on sunny autumn days.

The insects are so fixated on their tasks that they can be approached quite closely. It’s possible to get photos which show details such as the transparent wings and hairy legs and body of this bee.

The bee may have just set out for the day: there are only a couple of grains of pollen sticking to its body.

The spectacular red or ripening vibernum berries. I took this picture with a wide-angle lens almost touching the main subject, to produce an exaggerated perspective of the other berries and the reddening leaves on the rest of the bush.

These mushrooms were growing hiding under a bush not far from the Smestow Valley Ranger Station recently.

They don’t have an English name: indeed the only western European language which seems to have a name for them is German. That name translates as the grey and white carbolic mushroom.

A magpie busy feeding on the lawn outside the Customs and Excise office on Tettenhall Road, unconcerned at the people passing by.

It may be the same adult bird which had been feeding on the front lawn of one of the houses nearby pictured some weeks earlier, or possibly a now older chick which had been with the adult [picture].

A mixed flock of black headed and lesser black backed gulls which regularly rest up on the local playing fields.

A flock of jackdaws are increasingly prospecting the same area.

The boldest of the jackdaws were walking in the midst of the gulls.