Bubbles and fly agaric

I so enjoyed photographing stream bubbles that I went back to do some more. I went to a different part of the burn, a little downstream, to the place where it does a sharp turn downhill, to where we raced the plastic ducks in August, the place where some of the old bridge made of what look like wooden railway sleepers collapsed into the ravine taking a heifer with it and causing the farmer – when Toad and her pal finally told me about the dead cow and I had phoned the farmer – to have to come with a digger to hoik it out. The first digger was too heavy to get up the boggy field, so they had to get a smaller one. Then in a surreal moment, I looked out of the window and saw small digger transferring the dead heifer to big digger just outside our front gate!

But back to bubbles and, guess what!, more fungi. The place I went is the only place I've seen fly agaric around here and each autumn after the first time, I've been back to find it again. This is the only time I've seen it again. Perhaps I have not been at quite the right time or perhaps conditions have not been quite right for it to grow.

fly agaric fungus

I might go back with my macro lens later today.

But back to bubbles...

I experimented with shutter speeds. Here are some of the results.

Such shots show some of the limitations of photography or, more likely, the limitations of my photography skills, since neither of these types of image record quite what I was seeing. Fun though.

A couple more:

The following photo show how low the burn is at the moment. You can see how it washes round both sides of the rock in the middle where the little tree is growing when it is in full spate. On those occasions it has been known to burst out of the culvert at the bottom of the hill and flood the road and even, on one occasion a few years before we came to live here, one of the old cottages built right beside it before the culvert was built. The power of nature never ceases to amaze (and hopefully never will).

Lastly, a couple (couple of couples!) of leafy 'arty farties', more fungi (!), and part of my path back down our garden. I don't have to go between the tree trunks, but I do because I like the changes of the light that way affords. I think of it as the adult version of a child's wending its meandering way through a row of street bollards – impossible to go the 'ordinary' way ;-)

The trunks are of rowan (L), holly (middle), and bird cherry (R). You can see that flowering currant grows among them too.