Toadstools and tits
Toadstools and tits
I’m still in the grip of fungus fever. A telephone call from a friend – had we seen the fly agarics in the Ben Rhydding playing field, just along Bolling Road? Armed with camera we strolled down and peered over the hedge at the spot she’d indicated. No need for binoculars: there about five yards from the hedge in a group of three – the biggest fly agarics I’d ever seen. We went into the field for a closer look. Each was eight to ten inches across making an overlapping formation about two foot wide. Scattered around were more – from the youngest just thrusting from the ground like an emerging egg to neat examples of the more usual size – and all, miraculously, undamaged by the slugs that usually ravage new fungi. Fly agarics are easy to identify. They’re the fairy-tale toadstools, bright red with white spots, white stalks and crisp white gills. The white on top is not really spots but remnants of a sticky white veil that cloaked the emergent fungus and broke up as it grew, and here we had examples of every stage of growth. They are wonderfully photogenic – but definitely not edible, so treat with care.
The WNS annual Fungus Foray was held a couple of weeks ago in Westy Bank Wood, Bolton Abbey on a chilly but gloriously sunny morning. The complete list comprised over fifty species – not our best score, but some interesting finds included. Years ago the procedure for such forays was everyone collecting specimens as they rummaged through the undergrowth and then a session of identification of the joint haul. Nowadays we are more conservation conscious: only our two or three experts actually take specimens which the rest of us draw to their attention, so leaving plenty more to release their spores and maintain their place in the woodland ecology. For most of us, easy-to-use digital cameras also enable us to have a more lasting record of our finds.
It’s always a delight to me to be in a mature wood, especially with sunlight dappling the carpets of fallen leaves. You never know what you may see. One of our group caught the sound of soft whistling calls and, looking up, we glimpsed a small party of redwings as they crossed a gap in the trees. My first winter thrushes this year! Now the arrival is in full swing – three hundred fieldfares were spotted at Timble on October 20th. What’s more, it looks like being a good waxwing year with several early arrivals already, including twenty seen foraging in a suburban street in Baildon just last week. These attractive visitors from Scandinavia come here to feast on berries, and this year’s harvest seems a particularly good one.
Meanwhile, there are other ways to prepare for winter. My seed feeders are visited constantly throughout the day by a series of tiny coal tits. They buzz in, seize a seed and buzz off again, returning a minute later having secreted the booty in a winter cache. A good strategy – and one that enabled my local coal tits to survive the prolonged cold of last winter, so they’re welcome to as many seeds as they can manage.
