I sometimes get asked how I come up with enough ideas to post a blog every single day. This post goes some way to explaining how it works for me. I walk … a lot, and my camera is my constant companion, and I am by nature curious about … well, everything, really … and I’m also quite an observant person. So, for example, I went out for a wander around one of my local parks on Monday afternoon, thinking I would see if there were any fungi about, and also to get some photos of berries for a future blog. In the process of taking those photos, I noticed how many galls there were on this one particular oak tree so also took some photos of those … which then led me to check the neighbouring trees for galls. (If you’re not sure what galls are, there will now be a blog post on them as well!)

When I got home and started going through my photos, this particular image really grabbed my attention because, for me, this is such a good example of one of Nature’s whodunnits. I look at this and my brain is immediately flooded with questions: how were these galls made? Why are they that shape? What is the creature that’s dead on the leaf? Is it a wasp? Did it make the galls? What killed it? It looks like it has white strands around it – a spider’s web or some kind of fungus? What created the bare patch where the leaf’s veins are showing? Was it the larvae of the wasp? What created the almost perfectly round hole in the leaf? Was that a leafcutter bee or something else? Was it the wasp? And what is the teeny weeny white thing? The shed skin of a larva perhaps?

I don’t know the answers to any of these questions … yet. But, if I find out and if I can get more images related to the story, the result could be a blog or three from just this one photo. And so it goes on …