Wolves Wild

Closer view of the heron which featured in the previous post. The neck looks too thin to support the head, let alone to swallow the kinds of prey the bird lives on.

It was just downstream of Lucy’s Mill Weir, and seemed aware of but unconcerned by the regular pedestrian traffic on the bankside footpath.

Spider, probably a cross spider, wrapping silk around an insect which had been caught in its web.

I noticed the spider at work while I was sitting having a quiet drink on the terrace of the Dirty Duck by the river in Stratford on a sunny afternoon recently.

It would suit me if all wildlife watching could take place in similar circumstances.

Some of the Japanese acers in West Park, their leaves changing colour.

Whoever planted them seems to have ensured that they are of different species or varieties, so as to give different autumnal colours.

These pictures were all taken on the same morning at the start of the month.

Small stagshorn fungus, tiny and brightly coloured, grows in damp open ground. Yellow stagshorn looks similar but larger, and grows in woodland.

Ripe holly berries on a sunny morning, glistening because they were still wet from overnight rain.

Puffball which had lost most of its spores and was beginning to split open.

Berries growing on one of the dogwood bushes by the larger pool at Perton.

Yellow stagshorn fungus only grows to a couple of inches tall, but it is usually a bright, almost fluorescent, yellow – though the colour can range from orange to almost white.

This was one of several clumps growing on the ground in the wood at Northycote Farm.

Rose hips on one of the bushes on the margin of the Barley Field.