Wolves Wild

Some portrayals of birds for the new year. Among them, a jaunty jackdaw on a mug, displayed in the window of a residential house on the high street of Rye. Another is a swan, wings outstretched, decorating the hall of the medieval butchers guild on the Grand Square in Brussels.

The pious pelican feeding her chicks with blood from her own breast is one of two birds from a side door of the cathedral at Cologne. There’s a weathervane which was on a high street bank, portraying the logo of that bank.

Numbers of tufted ducks at West Park are slowly rising, as they fly in to use the lake as a refuge for the winter. On my last visit, they all spent some time close to the island. half-hidden by overhanging branches. Finally, a few ventured out into the open water.

The gigantic spider sculpture Maman by Louise Bourgeois: this is the version outside the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and a child’s cuddly toy in the form of a tarantula, lost in a road; the sculpture is meant to be maternal, and the toy presumably comforting.

In contrast, a pair of real spiders, female and a much smaller male.

A small patch of grass under a pair of beech trees by the side of Richmond Road has been surprisingly productive of fungi this autumn. Since September there have probably been at least seven or eight different species, easy to spot, at one time or another.

I first noticed these orange peel fungi towards the end of October. The same fruiting bodies remained almost two months later, still giving an impression of some carelessly discarded litter.

I’m not sure quite why, but these pigs (the child’s ride excepted) all seem to me to be boars rather than sows.

The bronze statue was outside council offices in Winchester.  The hungry pig weathervane adorned a farm by a road out of the almost lost village of Dunwich, while the one representing just the head was over the East Gate at Warwick. The piglet was in a narrow side street in Cologne city centre.

Another piglet, in a shop window in Stratford on Avon.

A stone wall with a thick coating of moss gave support to several other tiny plants. Among them were these equally tiny mushrooms, with distinctive caps like miniature umbrellas which had been blown inside out by the wind.

They’re too small and too easy to miss to have attracted a vernacular name. The pattern matching algorithm at iNaturalist IDs them as Arrhenia rickenii, but that is unconfirmed.