The clear skies were well and truly absent when I set off to work this morning. It was a slow and careful drive through thick fog. Consequently there was little to see at the pond… or to be precise there was little that I could see at the pond.

There was a temporary respite in the middle of the day (my drive home in the evening was once again through fog), and some cool sunshine. So for some welcome variety here’s a greylag goose with a nice reflection in the calm of the water.

There were plenty of gulls (herring and black-headed varieties). This black-headed was one of the few already displaying its breeding plumage from which their name derives.

As for the ‘tree slime’ in the title, it was bright orange and oozing from a recently cut tree stump.

From what I’ve found about this, it’s a yeast that feeds on the rising sap of untreated stumps, and is more prevalent after extended periods of wet weather. Well the trees around the pond have been cut back in the past few weeks, and we’ve certainly had an extended wet period. The slime is harmless. There’s some straightforward information about this stuff on the Cornell Mushroom Blog.

And yes, in case you are wondering I did spy the occasional small furry rodent. To be fair they were mainly keeping out of sight (the lunchtime sun brought quite a number of people out, and the rats prefer to keep out of view when it’s busy). This is a silhouette of a rat running down a tree.

It then made a dash across the water to the security of a bankside rat run.

Camera note: all photos taken with the Canon 7D and EF 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L USM IS lens.