Just waiting to get their hooks into you ...

Hooked fruits of six British wild flowers, that you might find attached to your trousers after a country walk in autumn. How many can you identify? Answers at the bottom.

A. Fruits about 2.5 cm. in diameter. Common on woodland edges and waste ground.

B. fruits about 5mm. long. In hedgerows and grassland, often on calcareous soils.

C. Fruits about 3mm. long. A woodland herb.

D. Fruits about 3mm. in diameter. A major agricultural weed, common in hedgerows.

E. Fruits about 8-10mm. A common weed of waste places, often found on woodland edges.

F. Fruits about 3mm. A woodland herb.


















Answers:
A. Burdock Actium lappa.
B. Agrimony Agromonia eupatoria
C. Enchanter's nightshade Circaea lutetiana
D. Gooosegrass aka cleavers aka sticky Jack Galium aparine
E. Herb bennet aka wood avens Geum urbanum
F. Sanicle Sanicula europaea

Signs of the changing season ..

A female common green grasshopper Omocestrus viridulus, looking for somewhere to lay her eggs .....

..... dry grasses highlighted by the afternoon sunshine ...

.... and a swallow skimming over the pastures and catching insects, building up energy reserves for the long flight south.


A pictures taken at Blanchland in Northumberland this afternoon.

Fruity

It looks like being a very poor year for brambles up here in Durham but it was a different story down in North East Lincolnshire at the weekend, where the blackberry bushes at the back of the sand dunes at Cleethorpes local nature reserve were laden with fast-ripening fruits.

The scrubby vegetation at the back of the dunes here is dominated by sea buckthorn, which also carried a fine crop of ripening berries, that look particularly attractive against the shrub's silver-grey foliage. Birds never seem very interested in these berries, which often are still untouched well into winter. The same can't be said for the elder berries here, which were being consumed rapidly by large, noisy flocks of starlings.

Many of the juvenile starlings were in their transitional plumage, still bearing traces of their first set of brown feathers but rapidly moulting into their smart spotty winter attire.