Ted Walks in the time of ... etc, Pt 10

One thing the continuing pandemic offers is the chance to really get to know your locality over time. Which is fine if you live in the country, but not so great if you're a city dweller, or, like us, in the edgelands. At the beginning of lockdown, I had no idea how I was going to access nature. That was before we discovered the meadow, wood and common beyond the golf course, which had clearly saved themselves for this Covid-19 eventuality, and for which the Northerner, the dog and I are profoundly grateful.

So. I enjoyed watching spring unfurl in this new-to-me nearby, and now it's summer's turn. Here are some (random) photos. 

A rose bedeguar gall, Robin's pincushion or moss gall 

Robin is Shakespeare's Puck.

A teasel in its glad rags

A treasury of vetch

A murky evening in the meadow

The ubiquitous red soldier beetle on wild carrot ... 

... ragwort ... 

... creeping thistle ... 

... and hogweed, more often than not doing what they do best.

Strange fungus for a tree stump

A man and his dog

One of our frequent, continuing sightings is of a kestrel hawking the meadow at sundown. 

Turning into the wind again and again is a useful metaphor for these times.

One night we watched it drop and come up, empty-clawed. It then went to perch on a conifer at the top of a meadow, close to where we were watching the sun go down ...

... before taking off again. Non angeli sed kestreli, as my friend Dru observed. 

A perturbation of jackdaws

In addition to learning Lady Macbeth's hand washing speech, I've been studying the difference between umbellifers this year, so as to avoid calling them all cow parsley in future. It's been really interesting. 

In the meadow, the summer shift of upright hedge parsley has taken over from pignut ...

... though there's still plenty of hogweed around ...

... some of it on the tall side (though not officially Giant). 

(This is my friend, Liz.)

It's the wild carrot I've fallen in love with, though.

I think it might be my favourite of all the umbellifers, and I'm really looking forward to seeing all the seed heads turn into mad hats.

A moody carrot on Charlton Common

And then there are those moments when you pause in the gap between the brambles, and wonder what you will see around the corner. It's a bit like the contents of the briefcase in Pulp Fiction ...

... only better. 

Jackdaws homing

Twmbarlwm on the horizon

Creeping thistle

This has become my bolt hole and sanity saver. The perfect patch. 

Finally, from Robin's pincushion to this fledgling who flew into the patio doors a few days ago. If it had lived, it would have had a blog post of its own, like the young starling from 2016. Sadly, it was too new and too shocked to survive. RIP, little robin.