June 27th – Another grim, overcast day threatening rain but there is always brightness in a midsummer gloom – and here, it’s ragwort.
Another yellow weed that’s usually overlooked and indeed hated by horse owners, to whose animals it’s poisonous, this is actually a beautiful wayside flower that feeds bugs aplenty and keeps pollinators busy.
Many of what we would ordinarily class as weeds are very, very beautiful if we stop and look closely.
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 – I wasn’t expecting much when I headed to Chasewater; battling a strong wind and drizzle, the place was all but deserted and my circuit of the lake looked set to be dismal.
However, I was to be proven wrong; first of all I spotted a group of three red deer browsing the north heath contentedly, and they were happy for me to take pictures, even seeming to pose. But the real treat was waiting on the brow of the hill.
There was an adult female plucking greens from the trees, and after stopping to photograph her too, I noted she had another adult and two fawns with her. They progressed down to the marsh and loosely joined with the earlier three.
The antics of the fawns – never still for a moment – were lovely and the deer weren’t a bit shy or skittish. I watched them for a long time, even thought the rain was pretty steady.
However used to these gentle, beautiful beasts I become, I still can’t remove myself from the shock that we have them here, living on our green spaces. A wonderful, beautiful spectacle.
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 23rd – I had to nip to the Holford industrial estate in North Birmingham on the way home from work – I was going to go to Walsall and hop on a train, but it was quicker just to head straight there. Making my way to the station on my return, I spotted this curious sight on the corner of Brookvale Road and Deykin Avenue in Witton.
I can’t make much sense of this – why remove a key part of a building like that? I was particularly taken with the fireplace and chimney still clinging on for dear life.
I sense there’s a story here. If anyone knows, I’d love to hear it.
June 23rd – Always nice to see the bindweed in flower. Another plant ignored as a weed of the fringes and wastelands, this prolific member of the Convolvulus family has beautiful flowers if you take a closer look, and very nearly pure white too.
It’s common from mid summer until autumn, supports a whole range of bugs and Lepidoptera and is one of those plants our hedgerows would be very much duller without.
June 22nd – Two poor pictures, but ones I just had to share, as they’re of birds I don’t see very often locally: Jays. There was a pair of these intelligent, resourceful corvids bickering over something and chasing each other from tree to tree. I assume one had interloped on the other’s patch, but whatever was happening, there was a lot of squawking, warning chiming and wing flapping.
These are beautiful, colourful birds and they were battling in the trees near the Pier Street Bridge by Clayhanger Common in Brownhills.
A rare delight and I’m sad I didn’t get better pictures.
June 22nd – More cats, sorry, but I just loved these pair, again in the cat metropolis of Scarborough Road, Pleck. There had been light drizzle, and the air was cooling but this pair of lazybones were in the same garden, asleep and totally oblivious.
I particularly like how the black one has fallen asleep while having a wash.
Oh, for the life of a cat…
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.
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