25 Tuesday Sep 2018
Tags
British fungi, brittlestem fungi, Conical brittlestem, fungus, Parasola conopilus, Psathyrella conopilus
After misidentifying my fungi last week, I’m going to take a huge chance and say that I’m fairly confident these are Conical brittlestems (Parasola conopilus, formerly known as Psathyrella conopilus). I completely understand if you don’t believe me!
21 Friday Sep 2018
It’s Fungi Friday and today I have for your pleasure and delight one of the Russula species of fungi. According to the First Nature website of fungi expert Pat O’Reilly, around 160 species of Russula can be found in Britain, and I know from venturing out on past forays with the Glamorgan Fungus Group that the reddish-coloured ones can be especially difficult to identify so I’m not even going to try to put a name to these particular fungi. I just think they’re rather lovely and I hope they brighten your day as much as they did mine.
19 Wednesday Sep 2018
Tags
autumn fungi, confusing fungi, Coprinopsis lagopus, Coprinus comatus, fungus, Hare's-foot inkcap, inkcaps, Lawyer's wig, Shaggy inkcap
I think you can see how this shaggy little fungus got one of its common names, Lawyer’s wig, as it so well resembles the wigs lawyers wear in court. This is Coprinus comatus, also, not surprisingly, known as the Shaggy inkcap. Coprinus means ‘living on dung’ but this fungus really just prefers very rich soil with lots of decaying plant matter. These are usually found in groups of up to 20 individuals, and I found this little group of five along the edge of a woodland path, a fairly typical habitat.
Edit: My fungi friend Graham very kindly pointed out that I had mis-identified my initial find but, luckily, I saw some real Shaggy inkcaps today, so I have changed the photos above to show those.
The confusion species, which my initial photos (below) showed, was actually the Hare’s-foot inkcap (Coprinopsis lagopus). Perhaps you can see why I was confused by all that shagginess!
15 Saturday Sep 2018
I called this post ‘Bute oysters’ (because I found them during a wander in Cardiff’s Bute Park last week) but maybe that should be beaut oysters because there’s no denying these Oyster fungi are sculptural beauties.
And I called them oysters but I’m not actually sure what they are – mostly likely some type of Oyster (Pleurotus sp.) or Oysterling (Crepidotus sp.). I gave up trying to identify fungi species a year or so back when I realised that you really need a microscope to have any chance with most of them and I decided I didn’t want to go down that route.
I still enjoy looking at them and admiring their beauty though.
23 Thursday Aug 2018
Tags
birding, birdwatching, British birds, Crossbill, Garwnant Forestry, Glamorgan Bird Club, Llwyn-on reservoir
We birders of the Glamorgan Bird Club are tough: we don’t let almost constant drizzle put us off a good day’s birding. Heck, we even sit at picnic tables eating our lunch in the drizzle. As long as our optics (bins, ’scopes and cameras) aren’t getting damaged by the wet, we carry on.
And it was certainly worth carrying on ’cause we enjoyed a magnificent day’s birding. We started off with a walk around the trails at Garwnant Forestry in the morning and followed that with a walk through the woodland to check out Llwyn-on reservoir in the afternoon.
I notched up my 187th bird species for the year with the several Crossbills we spotted and heard in various locations along the forestry tracks, and we also enjoyed good sightings of Willow tits and Willow warblers, Tree pipits and Treecreepers, and more than a few Spotted flycatchers flitting in and out from the trees and shrubs in their constant search for the perfect fly snack.
Crossing the Llwyn-on feeder stream after lunch, I earned some brownie points for spotting a Dipper splashing about upstream, and the Spot flies were also active along the river bank there.
As we walked through the woodland at the northern end of Llwyn-on reservoir, we were amazed and delighted by the sight of thousands of tiny mushrooms (probably one of the Mycena species) growing under the conifers, as well as several large groups of False chanterelles. I even had the birders sniffing at a white mushroom to teach them why it’s called The Miller – ‘It smells of dough/flour’, they correctly said.
At the reservoir we marvelled at the magical sight of over 200 House martins feeding on insects above the shallow water – luckily for the birds, the reservoir is beginning to fill again after our recent drought. And the perfect finish to a wonderful day came with the cheery sight of 3 Yellow wagtails grazing together with, perhaps, 16 Pied wagtails in the grass at the water’s edge.
One of the many small streams in the area
Here’s my sightings list for the day: Blackcap, Blue Tit, Bullfinch, Buzzard, Carrion Crow, Chaffinch, Chiffchaff, Coal Tit, Cormorant, Crossbill, Dipper, Goldcrest, Goldfinch, Great Crested Grebe, Great Tit, Grey Heron, Grey Wagtail, House Martin, Jay, Lesser Black-backed Gull, Long-tailed Tit, Nuthatch, Pied Wagtail, Raven, Reed Bunting, Robin, Spotted Flycatcher, Swallow, Tree Pipit, Treecreeper, Willow Tit, Willow Warbler, Woodpigeon, Wren, and Yellow Wagtail. Also seen or heard, but not by me, were Blackbird, Great spotted woodpecker, Lesser redpoll, Sand martin and Siskin – well, I might’ve heard the Siskin but I’m not entirely sure.
19 Monday Mar 2018
Tags
biodiversity, Blue tit, Blushing bracket, Brittle cinder, coal tit, Elfcups, Forest Farm, Forest Farm Nature Reserve, Great tit, Grey heron, Hairy curtain crust, Moorhen, nuthatch, Song thrush, wren
I’ve blogged about the charms of the Forest Farm Nature Reserve many times before but I thought I’d share some of the highlights from last week’s wander …
Oh, and I will just add that the combination of feathers – me mostly looking upwards – and fungi – eyes down – can be quite difficult. By the end of the day, I felt like one of those nodding dog ornaments you used to see in the rear windows of cars. Still, ’twas a lovely long meandering walk!
17 Saturday Feb 2018
The big picture:
a group of wooden posts, incised with rune-like writing, once part of a sculpture trail around Cosmeston Lakes Country Park.
The small picture:
an incredible diversity of lichens, mosses and fungi in a surprising array of subtle textures and hues.
27 Saturday Jan 2018
Though I have since learnt that this expression is also used by birders, ‘Little brown job’ is a term I first heard used in relation to fungi, the many and varied, brownish-hued conglomerations of fungi that have few distinguishing characteristics (unless you’re a whizz with a microscope) and so can often be notoriously difficult to identify. Here are some I’ve seen this week.
05 Friday Jan 2018
My local fungus group has a new challenge going for the month of January, to find a ‘living fossil fungus’. Sounds weird? Well, the ‘living fossil’ is the Ginkgo tree (Ginkgo biloba), a tree that’s been around since the time of the dinosaurs (read more about this beautiful tree on my sconzani blog here), and the fungus is Bartheletia paradoxa, a basidiomycete that only grows on Ginkgo leaves and has characteristics that are unique amongst basidiomycetes (for the science geeks out there, here’s a link to an expert article).
The fungus was not formally recognised until 1932 and was first found in Britain, on the leaves of a Ginkgo at Kew Gardens, in 2008. There are still very few official records for it but, as members of our fungus group are now discovering, it seems to be on almost every Ginkgo tree we can find.
As you can see from the photos, the fungus looks like black spots on the fallen leaves. Of course, autumn is long gone and the winter winds that have been roaring across Britain this past week have blown away a lot of fallen leaf litter but it’s still worth looking look around any Ginkgo trees you know of in your local parks. I found these leaves on Wednesday around the magnificent Ginkgo avenue in Bute Park, behind Cardiff Castle, and I have another couple of places to go looking in the next few days. So, do see if you can find yourself a ‘living fossil fungus’ as well.
24 Friday Nov 2017
You can’t have a blog named Earthstar without including, every now and then, a few photos of the Earthstar fungi for which it was named. I was pleased to see this little colony of Collared earthstars (Geastrum triplex) in Cardiff’s Cathays Cemetery is still thriving.
