Another bird portrayal from a misericord at Ludlow.
Pelicans are often portrayed in old churches. They were considered to be a symbols of Christ: it was thought that they killed their own chicks, then, three days later, speared their beaks into their own chests and drew blood which brought the chicks back to life.
These lime nail galls, on the leaves of lime trees, can grow to as much as half a centimeter tall, and range in colour from yellow to red. They are the protective covers of a mite, Eriophyes tiliae.
A speckled wood butterfly sits ready to defend its territory, resting on a sunlit leaf in a nettle patch in the meadow near the Smestow Valley Reserve Ranger Station.
The, as yet unripe, seeds of a yellow flag iris, growing by the canalside.
As they first begin to develop,these holly berries are practically the same colour as the branch they are growing from. They will have turned bright red well in time for Christmas.
Wildmoor sandstone direcly underlies the Bromsgrove conglomerate featured in a post yesterday. Here are two exposures of the rock heading from the Smestow valley towards Tettenhall ridge.
The first is in one of the many former quarries which are cut into this rock along the Smestow valley. The quarry now forms the site of Sandy Hollow, a small cul de sac off Compton Holloway.
The second is again a quarry face: this time the former quarry now forms the grounds of a house on Old Hill, Tettenhall, just downhill from the Mount public house.
This tiny green insect was on a nettle leaf by the canal towpath at Newbridge.
The almose fluorescent colours of a mallow flower in a hedgerow.
Some kind of very neat eater had been at this mushroom, taking the top off the cap and exposing the gills from above.
The Bromsgrove formation is one of the harder rocks which Wolverhampton rests on. The rock, which the more mature of us might know by its former name of Keuper sandstone, forms some of the highest ground in the city: the Tettenhall ridge and Bushbury, then extending from these towards Fordhouses.
Very little of this rock is actually exposed and visible within Wolverhampton’s boundaries (probably the biggest exposure is the Pendeford Rockin’). A little further north, on the road which connects Fordhouses and Pendeford to Bilbrook, there is a high point with a long exposure, probably where a cutting was made to smooth the gradient of the road.
The top picture is a close-up showing some of the mosses and lichens which have colonised the rock face. By chance, it happens to have missed the larger pebbles which are among the material which was composited to make the rock.
The second picture is taken from across the road, showing how the entire exposure is well on the way to becoming overgrown.
The dull brownish colour of the rock is very different to the bright sandy red of the immediately underlying rock, the Wildmoor formation (old name: Bunter sandstone) which can be seen in the valley of the Smestow, lower on the Tettenhall ridge or on Finchfield hill.
The adult of the cinnabar moth is day flying, and brightly coloured to show that it is unpalatable. The yellow and black stripes of the caterpillar serve the same purpose – young caterpillars are just yellow.
There were several caterpillars on this ragwort: their preferred food source.
The camera noise in these pictures is because I went out one night at sunset in search of badgers. I didn’t see any, so took this series instead.
The owl being mobbed by crows is one of the superb medieval misericords of St Laurence church, Ludlow.
Crows do indeed combine to attack owls and other birds of prey bigger than themselves. For the church in the middle ages, owls were not symbols of wisdom, but of demonic forces which moved around stealthily under cover of darkness.