I shot these over a few days at the cusp of
the months just gone and just arrived, I'm sure they are Ink Caps (Coprinus),
but which one (there are a dozen or more) is not so clear, my bible for such
things (Philips - of course!) doesn't have a perfect match, these (in the pictures)
being a bit small for the 'standard' Shaggy Ink Cap (Lawyer's Wig), but a bit
big for the Coprinus Lagopus they otherwise more closely resembled.
The detritus left in the third shots is
what you can make the ink out of and which gives them their common-name, except
you should harvest it before it gets to the state shown here!
Apropos the Wade /
Not-Quite-But-Probably-Irish-Factory-Wade Leprechauns we saw the other day,
Peter Evans sent me this a couple of days later and I was saving it for the
actual 'News Views' but thought this was an ideal way to mix toys and
naturalism!
Those of you with a good eye will have
realised - immediately upon seeing the above - that what I wrote the other day
was a load of cobblers, he wasn't carving a boat OR a crib . . . he's a
shoemaker!
He's plastic and not sitting on an Ink Cap,
but rather a Fly Agaric, or at least a hand-painter's idea of a Fly Agaric! And
there are shade's of Fontanini in the
Carrara'esque sample of Connemara marble beneath the Fly Agaric!
A distant relative (by time rather than
blood) used to breed Connemara Greys for the London taxi trade and is known in
the family for his pronouncement in the 1900's that petrol engines were noisy
and smelly and would never take-off! He (and the taxi trade) lost his horses to
the hell of Flanders and as the Western Allies grabbed large chunks of the
former Ottoman Empire with its cheap oil (throwing electric vehicles on the
scrap-heap for three generations), he chose to retire
Sadly although not distant by blood; he's
far enough away for me to be unable to apply for Irish Citizenship - so I'm
pinning my hopes on the Tories wreaking Bwreakxit!
Shades of Tintin!
This is meant to be a Fly Agaric too, it's
a Hong Kong (branded to a 'KT') plastic cake-decoration version of a Japanese cast-lead miniature
garden ornament, the lead versions themselves replacing the even earlier
ceramic/pumice ones. It's posed in an apple I rescued from three Hornets . . .
26th September 2017
. . . these three Hornets! Note the nervous
beating a retreat . . . twice! I'd chopped a few of the rotten apples up with
the mower and they were emanating a cider-smell from the top of the
compost-bin!
24th September 2013
They get so drunk on apples at this time of
year they can't fly! This chap (probably a barren chap'ess!) fell of the
woodpile several times before I started filming and went on to make several
more attempts, getting caught in the spider's web again too!
Like human drunks struggling to make their
legs walk in a straight-line, it just couldn't get its wings to work properly,
buzzing furiously, it was going nowhere, flight-wise!