These rural-looking pictures of a stream are nto what they appear. They are of a section of the Wom Brook LNR in Wombourne where the houses of the Poolhouse estate come up so close that careful composition was needed to keep evidence of the estate out of the pictures.
One of the Smestow valley buzzards, this time rising on a thermal over the fields between Castlecroft and the canal.
The brown hawker dragonfly featured in the previous post eventually settled down to rest on some thistledown by the canal towpath, seemingly unworried that I was already standing nearby. From the pictures it was possible to confirm that it was a male: the sexes are somewaht similar in colour, but the females lack the “waist”, the narrowing where the thorax and abdomen join.
Brown hawker dragonfly, flying rapidly and erratically up and down over the canal at Castlecroft, defending its territory and hunting smaller insects which it catches on the wing. It was moving so fast and so irregularly that these were the nearest I got to pictures of it, out of a dozen or more shots where it was in the frame.
A rosebay willowherb, this one on Gospel End Common, at the stage where the last of the flowers had almost gone.
Meadow brown butterfly resting half-hidden on a grass stem, getting warm before it took proper flight for the day.