Tag: canal

July 4th – It was a day of cats. Cats everywhere. Strolling, taking the air. Sleeping, lounging, supervising, watching. These are just a selection of the lovely pusses I met out and about on my commute.

Stripes was lounging under a car in Birchills, and was annoyed because I caught him washing his bum, legs asplay. Ginger was snoozing, half asleep in the shrubs near Catshill Junction, and is a cat I’ve seen many times. The pair of flat out sleepers? The same pair of sleepyheads I saw last week in Scarborough Road, Pleck, presumably waiting for their staff to return home.

Presumably the lack of sun but general still warmth encouraged these lazybones out today. It was wonderful to meet them.

July 3rd – It’s time for my annual heart-wrenching over the purple conundrum that is the butterfly bush. Buddleia is a prolific, very common shrub that will grow anywhere, in any scrap of earth or soot, and is synonymous with urban decay: look upwards in any town right now and you’ll see this tenacious battler growing and flowering from cracks in brickwork, lifting tiles on roofs, blocking gutters, prizing apart chimneys and crowding any embankment, towpath, disused rail line or wasteground.

It’s beautiful and very good not just for Lepidoptera, but all manner of bugs and is very, very pretty. But it is such a symbol of dereliction and decay.

June 28th – A miserable wet day, but thankfully, I mostly managed to avoid the worst of the rain. Although not great for me, it’ll be good to swell the rapidly growing fruits by the wayside.

How quickly we move to the fruiting phase of summer: Rowan berries, cherries, haws and all manner of delights are now developing steadily and beginning to ripen.

A genuine delight on a dreadful morning, but where the hell is summer slipping away to?

June 26th – the weather was grey and overcast on the way home and it had been raining, but I managed to just miss the showers. At Walsall Wood, momma mallard was inexplicably stewarding her new brood through a clump of water lilies. 

The ducklings, confused, were endlessly entertaining as they tried to stand on the foliage and invariably failed. Their mother seemed to be enjoying the spectacle and there seemed to be plenty of food in the clump too.

A lovely entertaining thing to see – and those waterlines are gorgeous.

June 26th – A brighter day and on the journey to work, a small mystery.

A huge pine cone, eaten by something, probably a squirrel, lying on the canal towpath near Pleck.

It was lying under an apple tree, with no pines or conifers in sight.

Perhaps the grey bushy-tailed fellows commute a long way these days. 

This year’s apple crop is looking healthy, though…

June 25th – better day, but not for the weather. I was looking forward to a longish ride out, but the ongoing local issues and squally weather meant the ride I’d hoped for wasn’t going to happen. I contented myself with a loop around Brownhills, Chasewater and Walsall Wood.

At Anglesey Wharf, despite the poor day, the wild sweetpeas have clearly survived the scrub clearance last Autumn and are blooming beautifully around the old coal-loading chutes.

They cheered me up immensely, and I still find it remarkable that such lovely flowers sprout from what was once a dirty, grimy place. fantastic to see.

June 24th – A terrible, terrible day; bad news locally made social media and managing the main blog fraught with difficulty, and in the evening, I just had to switch off everything and walk away.

I found solace in spannering the bike and taking a ride around a late-night, somnambulant Brownhills to get some shopping from Tesco, which doesn’t close until midnight, and late hours Tesco is always an otherworldly, odd experience.

The TZ90 I’m currently using – having returned the Canon deeply unimpressed – is much better in low light that the TZ80 and I’m much happier with it as a camera than I thought I would be. There’s hope for the Lumix superzoom compacts yet, it would seem.

At points this day, I could quite happily have taken a torch to my entire online existence, as if it never happened; sometimes running the kind of local blog I do gets more serious than one would ever imagine. 

But a run out on the bike and some healthy distance made me feel better, and I started Sunday refreshed.

June 21st – Another high summer day, the longest as it happens, and from here on in, the days shorten to darkness; but there’s plenty of summer left and it’s been glorious so far, so I’m not too sad.

On the Walsall Canal heading for Darlaston, life is busy hunting, blooming and multiplying, with herons hunting on the far bank, families of geese making their way through dense waterlily beds and flowers looking gorgeous in the hot sun.

A Walsall Top Lock, basking on a piece of drifting wood, I even saw a terrapin, about the size of a saucer. Sadly, it slipped away before I got the camera out but these poor creatures, often released into the wild when too large for captivity are becoming a common sight in canals and pools of the UK.

A great day to be on a bike in the place I love.

June 20th – A day of errands in the Black Country and plenty of riding the canals, green and limpid as they always are in summer, and alive with life, from the Wednesbury mother and foal to the bugs in the cowparsley. 

The pink flowers are stunning and I spotted them on the way home in Harden, just on the canal bank there. Does anyone know what they are? they’re absolutely gorgeous.

June 19th – Returning from work I noted the Catshill Canada goose commune which appears to consist of two inseparable families was thriving. They don’t seem to have lost any of the goslings, and the older set are developing apace now, losing their mousey fluff and growing adult plumage, and the first wing feathers.

They have healthy appetites and are healthy, busy birds.

I noticed not far up the bank Mrs. Mallard with her newly hatched brood, which may well be her second set of the summer.

She was very proud and relaxed. I love to follow these little families on the canal.