Category: David

Silk tassel plant, more formally Garrya elliptica, with the catkins starting to develop. By late winter, when they are ready to release their pollen, they will have grown longer. The leaves they are resting on are from a camellia.

Winter, when little grebes return to the Wolverhampton stretch of the Staffs and Worcs Canal for their hard-weather quarters – usually. Last year I didn’t spot a single one. By the start of the month there was one on the stretch of water between Compton and Wightwick.

When I was taking the photos, I thought it was swallowing a fish. When I got home and looked at the pictures, what’s hanging from its beak is a piece of vegetation.

Hairy curtain crust, a common bracket fungus often seen in late autumn, high on the trunk of a tree shorn of all its branches in West Park.

Bespoke weather vanes from buildings spanning a rance from the edge of the North Sea in East Anglia to the Atlantic in the west of Cornwall.

Mythical beasts and human activities outnumber anything representing real wildlife. The series does squeeze in one picture with seasonal connections. The first in the set is St Nicholas with the children, an elaborate piece of ironwork on the tower of the church dedicated to the saint at Beaudesert, Henley in Arden.

Early morning recently at Northycote Farm. Some of the ducks still sleeping on the heavily frosted grass, while one of their companions walks round scanning the ground in search of something to eat.

A break from real wildlife for Christmas Day. Instead, representations of various animals I’ve come across over the years.

The only real seasonal member of this set is the robin, collection box for the RSPB outside the hide on their Bowling Green reserve on the Exe estuary.

The spouting whale was a bar sign on a narrow side street in Cologne city centre. The goat’s head doorknocker (sinister looking) on a house down a narrow and cobbled alley.

The cat is one one of a series of bespoke park benches in the centre of Great Malvern, commemorating famous one-time visitors to the area. Apparently Florence Nightingale was keen both on the drastic-sounding Victorian water cure and on cats.

Head along the Staffs and Worcs canal out of Wolverhampton heading north. Pass under the M54. On a lawn coming down to the canal bank, the shiny giraffe emerges from behind a tree.