Wolves Wild

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.

The start of this month, and a heavy frost which almost looked like snow from a distance in some places – none of them near to where this robin was displaying itself.

Swan family swimming on the canal away from Wightwick towards Compton. Unusually, there seem to be two different generations of young in the convoy.

The adult pair are in the lead. Next comes a cygnet from the current year’s brood, still with the juvenile brown parches in its plumage. Tail-end charlie seems to be the survivor of the previous year’s crop. Plumage adult white, but a bill which seems still to be changing to the orange colour of a mature bird.

Some wrinkled club fungi, probably fairly recently emerged. The larger specimens were in the grounds of the Masonic Hall on Tettenhall Road (visible from the pavement). The smaller, growing under one of the conifers in West Park.

Sequence of pictures of a magpie flying by above Northycote Farm.