Earlier this week I went for a short walk around part of the Sussex Weald to see if any mushrooms had popped up. We’ve experienced one of the driest springs on record and the warmest June for England, as well as three heatwaves already! Me and mushrooms don’t need three heatwaves, thanks.
Mushrooms need rain, warmth and moisture to thrive, and after a downpour earlier in the day I thought it might be worth having a look. Here’s what happened:
At the beginning you can hear my water bottle in my bag and a great spotted woodpecker ‘kicking’
I began in the presence of Bambi, or a fallow deer
I’ve started recording episodes again for my podcast Unlocking Landscapes. The latest episode is one about ivy and trees, a subject I find very interesting – I know a lot of people do.
You can listen here on YouTube or just search on any podcast-streaming platform:
The episode is only ten minutes and covers the following:
What ivy looks like
The ecology of ivy
Managing ivy on trees
Myths and misinformation about ivy
When people commit crimes against ivy(!)
Wildlife supported by ivy
My aim is to post once a quarter, recordings to take place outdoors, be quite focused and to be around 10 minutes long.
Five years ago we were facing up to the Covid-19 lockdowns. In response to the stay-at-home orders I began a weekly macro blog, an assignment from the gods? No, just our Supreme Leader at the time Boris Johnson and his better half in Public Health Chris Whitty.
While I can’t promise weekly blogs due to work and life commitments, it’s definitely time to dust off the macro lens after its winter slumber and step out into the garden to see what’s happening!
As ever, there’s far more going on than you might think. I also think it’s important that we look at and try to understand invertebrates when this misinformation is coming from the leader of the country (I know it could be worse, but get your facts straight, folks).
We depend on nature and our ecosystems and their wildlife for our food, clean water, fresh air and function. Wildlife has a right to exist and the world does not revolve around our species.
The snails are roosting in our front porch. My wife was wondering if they might be too hot there, as the paint’s white and it can get quite sweltry in there.
It looks to me like something is going on with the shells and they may be roosting to grow their shells. It’s not something I know much about. Please let me know in the comments if you have any info 🙂
We have some nice pansies my wife planted out by our front door. You can see the bee drive-in here with the dark landing marks and the brush of hairs to ensure the pollen of other pansies are retrieved from a visiting bee.
The broom plant flowers in a subtle way, these little yellow petals appearing from the red sepals.
This is a common little fly that seems to stand around on leaves and petals for ages!
Their eyes are very cool, and I enjoyed the single spot in their wings as well. These flowers are some saxifrages my wife bought from the garden centre.
In January on a cold Saturday afternoon I laid or ‘plashed’ the hazel shrub I had planted out in our hedge. It’s a little hedge, but the usual shrub that made up the hedge has died back so I needed to take action. It’s so pleasing (‘pleaching’?) to see the hazel respond so well and new shoots to appear from the lain-down stems.
I also uprooted a sapling that a squirrel had cached as a seed, which is doing well. I planted this out around the time of frosts, which shows hazel’s hardiness. I did know that was the case, but it’s nice to see it come through.
The normal hedge I mentioned is this Skimmia japonica. It’s good for pollinators, no doubt. But it doesn’t seem to last well without pruning.
It was abuzz with drone flies as spring really began to arrive in mid-late March.
These drone flies (Eristalis) are probably the most common winged-insect in our garden at the moment. They’re quite funny I think.
Bay flowers promise so much, but they are quite modest really. I am hoping this provides some decent nectar for any invertebrate that needs it.
I spotted this little crab spider hanging out on one of my thermal t-shirts. It’s probably Misumena vatia, the most common of the crab spiders.
A cat monument in our garden in memory of our cat Kaiser who loved this spot in the flowerbed. The wolf spiders also love this spot because it gets so warm. The white stone of the cat is even warmer than the surrounding soil. I think this may be a male and a female wolf spider, with the male the smaller of the two, with the palps (dark spots at the front of its head, in the cat’s eye!).
The fence next to the cat monument was a helpful basking spot for the first nursery web spider I’ve seen so far this year.
The flowering of our magnolia is short and sharp, but these globular flowers are a delight. Magnolias are very old trees in evolutionary terms, and here’s to another year under their belts.
I’ve been making an effort to go for a walk in my local slice of the Sussex Weald before work in recent weeks. The impact it has on my brain, body and soul is profound, having lost my connection with woodland somewhat recently.
Early spring is a special time in woodland, watching the the leaves appear, the first spring birds, and the woodland flowers. It is so much better than those hot, shady and sterile days of summer, in my view.
The chiffchaffs have been arriving, but the song thrush rules this chunk of the Weald. Its repeated phrases echo through the still leafless branches.
Wild branches against ranks of pine and birch.
Those birches, growing on old heathland, waiting for the onset of new leaves.
A birch tree harassed by honeysuckle, catching the morning light.
A green beech tree with lots of moss and algae.
The ride, with pines reaching across on either side.
Silver birches among bluebell leaves.
An old beech tree.
Bluebell leaves appearing below a mess of beech twigs and old leaves.
The grassy banks of the woodland ride. I often hear firecrest singing along these edges where the ivy climbs and a few evergreen trees like the cypresses grow.
One of the nice things about not living in a city is that you get to see hoar frost. I know this because I’ve spent most of my life in cities where the ‘heat island effect’ usually won’t allow for hoar frost to really develop during daylight hours.
Bramble leaves make it through the winter, providing a good platform for these frost spikes.
This thick frost covers the trees and hedges, everything vegetative really, in a thin veil of icing. The puddles become milky ice clouds.
After a very dark, grey and damp December, these blue skies and frosty landscapes have been welcome relief.
Not a great time to sit on a bench though.
This is a reed with a coating of frost.
Remarkably this oak tree still holds its leaves, which is unusual outside of cities in January. I have known deciduous oaks to hold leaves into January in London.
I always seek them out in this weather, especially with a little bit of backlighting. This is quite a heavy crop so the sharpness is lessened a bit. You probably don’t care.
That distant landscape is actually an equestrian estate. It is chewed to within an inch of its life, hence the black sticks of trees, compared to the rough grassland where I stood to take the photo.
In August I was camping in West Sussex. On the final morning I opened the tent door and nearly stepped on a dragonfly that was resting in the grass outside.
It had been a cloudy night and the ground was very dry compared with the previously dew-laden start.
The dragonfly is probably a migrant hawker (Aeshna mixta) and is known to breed in SE England. As its name suggests it can also migrate to England from southern Europe.
It’s a dream to find a dragonfly in such a restful state, although the insect is vulnerable. It was in the right place however, especially if it wanted its portrait done.
It was an excellent opportunity to look at the wings of the dragonfly close up. They are renowned for their beauty and likeness to stained glass.
By looking at the wings I noticed that a planthopper bug had leapt aboard the dragonfly.
Here’s a closer view. I’m not sure of the species but it’s one I don’t remember seeing before.
A day earlier we had walked along the River Adur, famous for its connection at Knepp Wildland. It was good to see some more wasps around, with so few of them being reported this year.
The wasp is scrapping a layer of wood from a handrail or fence post to be used in the construction of a nest. You can see the ball below its mandibles above.
What a lot of hard work, worthy of my respect that’s for sure.
For my mum’s birthday in early August, we visited Sheffield Park in East Sussex, just over the border from West Sussex. It’s a National Trust estate so membership is needed to avoid the £17 entrance fee.
I didn’t have a camera with me other than my phone, but the Pixel 7a has an amazing camera, so I managed some nice pics of a few damselflies.
Obviously these are people not dragonflies, but the area was absolutely zinging with Odonata (the scientific name for dragons and damsels). This is looking back towards where the estate house is, though it’s not somewhere you can enter. People live there like in olden times.
Perched on the edge of the giant rhubarb (Gunnera – a super invasive wetland plant installed in places like Sheffield Park long ago for their showy foliage) was a small red-eyed damselfly.
What a beauty. Damselflies generally rest with closed wings, while dragonflies have them open. That notion was quickly dispelled by my next sighting. Usually dragons are much bigger anyway, by the way.
I was chatting to my sister when I noticed a damsel had taken a very pleasing perch in a shrub. A damselfly holding its wings out!
Now this is a willow emerald damsel, a species which ten years ago people were losing their minds over. It was a new arrival in the UK, and likely indicative of a warming climate. Now they are everywhere in southern England, and we’re experiencing temperature breakthroughs year on year.
I was just pleased to share a nice day in Sussex with my nearest and dearest. You can’t ask for much more than that, except for maybe some beautiful damselflies.
Looking out over the Brooks, two dark bird-shapes soar against the faint outline of the South Downs. Below them are green conifers and leafless oaks.
Buzzards, I think.
A woman approaches me from behind and stands to the side of me. ‘Dude,’ she says. ‘There’re eagles out there!’.
I look through my binoculars again but can’t see any sign of white-tailed eagles (it’s not going to be golden eagle). They’re known to hang around the wetlands of Amberley and Pulborough, having been reintroduced to the Isle of Wight in recent years. This is an ideal place for them.
The images I’m looking for are brown and white Muppet-like characters, as I remember seeing them in Hungary and Czechia. Never before in Britain, though.
The eagle messenger tells me to head down to some of the hides where ‘someone will have a scope’.
I march down there and drop into the first hide, benches packed out. But people are only looking down at the bank right outside where a snipe stands still against the grass. There is no eagle energy here.
A man with a telescope and tripod on his shoulder and a camera around his neck walks down the path towards me. I ask about the eagles. They’ve gone off somewhere, he says, wishing he could be more help.
Heading to the next hide, which I recognise as the one the eagle messenger told me to stop off at, there’s palpable excitement among the benches. I find a spare seat and ask the woman next to me – is everyone looking for eagles?
She smiles, pointing out where they had just been seen. I listen as others describe their apparent return to view. Against the South Downs two dark shapes soar. Then I realise it – I’d already seen them, before I even knew what they were.
They weren’t buzzards, they were white-tailed eagles.
At the entrance to the woodland a sign warns of forestry activities. It’s time to expect deep rutting to the tracks and soil, and conifers pulled out of this vast area of afforested heathland, and old oak and beech woodland.
A song thrush lifts up from the track and onto a nearby branch. Their lives are bitter battles of survival in January. In early spring their music travels the woods and fields, parks and gardens. The bird stoops on the branch, eyeing me in that wild way.
The sun is shining and the birches gleam white in the treetops.
Pine needles are bleached to an almost aquamarine.
On the main trackway the machine rutting appears from a tract of maturing pine, oak and birch. A track churned-out by huge tyres and now full of milky-brown rainwater. The tyres, inevitably, have dug up sections of ditches where fleabane, hemp agrimony and common spotted orchids abound in summer.
Then again, this trackway and its ditches were likely created for the forestry works, so it’s maybe a case of swings and roundabouts. The extraction works are set to end here in the near future, no doubt to allow the woodland to move at its own pace. Plantation trees will be replaced by self-seeded birch, and the jays’ forgotten oak cache, if the deer don’t eat them.
There is something unexpectedly wild about forestry landscapes, their lack of obvious human culture. There is not much coppicing here, not much lopping or billhooking. No dining tables are set by charcoal burners, or mud huts packed up inside clearings.
No one is claiming it for their own, not even the foresters.
On Saturday 21st October I led a fungi walk in the Bramshott area for the South Downs National Park’s Heathlands Reunited project. Thanks to Olivia and Dan for setting the walk and guiding us on the day.
It was a chilly and showery day with breaks of sunshine to light up the birch and bracken.
Autumn had crashed in with its typical rain and leaf fall. I think the early mushroom season has been shortened by the hot September and sudden shift to seasonal storms. Just a thought.
Sulphur tuft was one of the first mushrooms encountered, among a whole load of small grey/brown mushrooms that I wasn’t able to ID on the spot.
This looks to me like one of the grey spotted amanitas but after a bit of a downpour.
This is very probably a blusher, amanita rubescens. You can see a slight pink hue at this premature stage.
Fly agarics were slow to show but when the walk passed through grassy open woodland, they abounded. This one was almost like a russula with its typical white veil remnants
Amanita citrina, the false deathcap, was one of the most common mushrooms on the walk. It was abundant in the areas of beech woodland and also the open, grassy birch and oak woodland.
I’m not sure which waxcap this is, but heath waxcap, Gliophorus laetus, would make sense because it’s a waxcap on a heath!
This was one of the few red russulas, though there were tens of different-coloured varieties along the way. Sometimes the only mushroom around was a russula.
This was a very large mushroom under an oak tree. I’ve not seen this species before but am leaning towards an ID of giant funnel, Aspropaxillus giganteus.
The only cep, Boletus edulis, in the whole area. I think most of these have been picked for the pot already by other visitors.
This nicely shows the change that occurs in blackening waxcap, Hygrocybe conica. It looks like a jelly sweet to begin with then becoming rather liquorice.
One picture that sums up the status of this wooded heath – an empty blank bullet casing underneath sulphur tuft.
Unlocking Landscapes 