Wolves Wild

Earth stars, fungi which look like nothing on earth. Quite often to be found half-hidden in the vegetation under hedgerows or in undergrowth.

These were the commonest species of the group – collared earth stars.

Witch-hazel (hamammelis): the yellow flowers on one shrub just emerging, the orange flowers nearby already more developed.

Candlesnuff / stagshorn is a small, common fungus which grows on dead wood, including tree stumps and sometimes dead roots.

In its candlesnuff form it is a little like a part-used and currently unlit candle wick: as stagshorn it branches like miniature antlers.

Both forms of the fungus were on the same fallen tree trunk.

Male swan on the canal at Castlecroft, swimming close to the towpath shore. There’s usually an adult female and one or more young birds around as well, but not on the day these pictures were taken.

It may be called a nuthatch, but this seed feeder is the one the bird makes a bee line for.

A dunnock, feeding on the ground, after scraps which have fallen, knocked by the birds eating above.

The feeding station at Northycote Farm is popular with the local wild birds all year round, but especially in winter. The birds are well used to spectators. Usually they fly away if anyone new arrives at the viewing area, but return in full force in a few seconds. The pictures in this and today’s other posts from the feeding area were all taken in a spell of less than five minutes.

For starters, bluetits and coal tits, spending most of their time eating the grain, occasionally shifting to the peanuts for a change.

Insects are more rarely portayed in street art than birds or mammals. Here are a few I have come across.

The green grasshopper (for all I know, a cricket or cicada) was part of the window display in a shop in the French Atlantic resort of St Jean de Luz.

The wrought iron doorstep bannister, with dragonflies among bullrushes, was in the Exe estuary village of Topsham. And the dragonfly doorknocker is at Newbridge.

Modern ceramic dragon occasionally on house roof ridges, here a house near to Penn Common.

The old-looking and rusty doorknocker was in the picturesque Cotswold village of Chipping Campden, and the indoor picture is of a medieval weathervane now in Exeter museum. It’s a wyvern.

The doorlatch is from the medieval parish church at Meriden, and again looks like it might be ancient.

Mobile phone mast near Wombourne, designed to blend into the landscape because it is disguised as a tree. The plan doesn’t work.

The mast is visible from a wide area to the west of Wolverhampton. Here seen from the opposite side of the field it is on the edge of: for comparison, a more distant view.

Graffiti of a robin and a kingfisher on bridges on the Railway Walk, Wombourne way, seem to me to be a similar style to the work on the now demolished buildings in Graiseley.

The owl on a stump carving, next to a footpath passing Belvide Reservoir outside Brewood, fooled me in silhouette from a distance.

The woodpecker is perhaps more ornament that use – hence the need for a repair with glue.

Owl doorknockers and the traditional cocks for weathervanes seem to predominate, but there are a few variations here.

The wrought iron heron and owl are from the former Wolverhampton Environmental Centre gate. The impressive weathervane of the owl swooping to catch a mouse is from a house just of the Compton Road.