Wildlife from Wolverhampton and nearby
Trees with leaves changing colour for the autumn, reflected in one of the ponds in the garden at Wightwick Manor recently.
The main photo is centered on the reflection. and has then been turned upside down to give an effect I find disorienting. The second picture gives a view of tree and reflection, right side up.
A distant view looking towards Wolverhampton city centre. the Mander Centre office building silhouetted by a sky lit by the rising sun, a fortnight ago.
An unidentified species of mushrooms, but evidently one which was popular with the local fauna.
They were hard to spot under the vegetation at the bottom of the hedge by the towpath near Castlecroft.
I was surprised to notice two umbellifers still flowering in the middle of November. This plant, with the striking pink rim to the flowers, was the one whose frozen leaf has already featured in a post
a couple of days ago.
The plants were in the same field, on the same frosty morning, as the old umbellifer, and the umbellifer with ripening seeds, which featured in today’s earlier posts.
Umbellifer seeds just beginning to ripen. Picture taken just a few minutes before the frosted umbellifer in the previous post.
The dried remains of the head of one of the summer’s umbellifers, seen on a frosty morning a month ago.
Just about everything has had a coating of frost on recent mornings, including this fern growing on a grassy bank.
A mallard drake heading across the partly frozen Birmingham Canal earlier this week.
First he gingerly stepped across a patch where the ice was (barely) thick enough to support him.
He gradually sank into the water as he continued forward, seeming happier once he was able to swim.
Several of the tiny waxcap mushroom species are bright yellow and do not blacken with age. If anything, these faded instead.
My guess is that these were the commonest such species, butter waxcaps.
Some of these had flattened caps.
One even had a cap with an upturned margin, putting the gills on display.
A magpie as it paused, resting on a bough of one of the West Park trees, watching me suspiciously.