30 Friday Jul 2021
Don’t you love it when a plan comes together? A couple of months ago I found this small bit of wood with tell-tale green colouring so secreted it in a damp place in the woodland.
When I checked it yesterday, result! These are Green elfcups, still tiny but hopefully there will be more next time I look as they usually fruit in the autumn.
02 Friday Jul 2021
Posted in fungi
You might remember that on 18 June I blogged about Wolf’s milk, one of the Lycogala species of slime moulds, and noted that I couldn’t positively identify it until I saw the colour of its spores. Well, I’ve been back to recheck these slime balls. They took a bit of finding, as the dense tree canopy of the woodland makes the area quite dark and their change of colour as the slime balls have matured made them blend in with the log they were growing on, as you can see below.
The good news is that I have been able to identify them. I ‘popped’ one – not a bad thing for the slime as this released its spores for distribution – and found the spore colour to have a pinkish hue, which confirmed the species as Lycogala terrestre.
18 Friday Jun 2021
Posted in fungi
Two species of the slime mould Lycogala can be found in Britain, Lycogala epidendrum and Lycogala terrestre, and it’s only possible to distinguish one from the other by checking the colour of their spores, grey and pink respectively. To do that I’d need to revisit these lovely globules of Lycogala in a week or so – I’ll try to remember, and update this post accordingly.
Both Lycogala species are commonly known as Wolf’s milk, though I’m not sure why that is. Perhaps someone thought the orange-pink substance they secrete when poked resembled the milk of wolves? North American’s apparently call it Toothpaste slime, which makes me glad I don’t use their brands of toothpaste!
04 Friday Jun 2021
It’s Fungi Friday and, though this time of year is not what I usually think of as prime fungi time, fungi are always with us, around us, underneath our feet, in the air we breathe, and I did find some prime examples earlier this week.
The vibrant yellow-orange-red patches on these Stinging nettles are Nettle rust (Puccinia urticata), and there were a lot of them.
As you can imagine, they were not easy to photograph, particularly as the plants were swaying slightly in the gentle breeze.
Fortunately, I spotted a patch of Dock nearby and used a leaf of that to shield my fingers while I held the plants steady.
26 Friday Mar 2021
Tags
British fungi, British insects, Daldinia concentrica, King Alfred's Cakes, springtail, woodlouse
King Alfred’s been back in the kitchen but a Great British Bake Off winner he is not. His cakes, otherwise known as Daldinia concentrica, even when you can peek inside their blackened exteriors, never look palatable. With these I found in the woods this week though, Alfred has certainly produced some creative shapes.
And, even if inedible, they are sturdy enough to provide a home to tiny creatures, in this case a woodlouse and a springtail.
12 Friday Mar 2021
Tags
blackthorn, bracket fungi, British fungi, fungi on Blackthorn, Phellinus pomaceus, Prunus spinosa
Though I haven’t been able to verify its identification, I’m fairly sure today’s fungus is Phellinus pomaceus.
It’s a hard, woody bracket fungus that grows on Prunus tree species – in this case, it’s growing on Blackthorn (Prunus spinosa).
The NBN (National Biodiversity Network Trust) Atlas entry for this species (which also includes a map showing where in Britain the fungus has been recorded) says ‘It is not aggressively pathogenic but can cause considerable decay in trees suffering from other stress factors’, so you wouldn’t want to find it in a commercial fruit orchard. In my case, the fungi were only showing on two adjacent trees in a large copse of Blackthorn, and the trees looked quite elderly, so I don’t think it’s causing a problem.
26 Friday Feb 2021
I was almost home from today’s 7-mile walk when I spotted the subject of this post, lots of pink gall-like bumps on the leaves of a group of plants I quickly realised were Nipplewort (Lapsana communis).
And that clinched the identification of the bumps, especially when I turned a leaf over and spotted the little yellow dots. These are the aecia, cup-shaped structures in which aeciospores are produced. (And, as you can see, this particular leaf was also home to a tiny spider.)
These Nipplewort plants were absolutely covered in rust fungi, Nipplewort Rust (Puccinia lapsanae), a rust I’ve seen before but never in such quantity.
19 Friday Feb 2021
Posted in fungi
I can never go past Turkey tail fungi (Trametes versicolor) without checking out their wonderful rings of colour.
These are neither as vibrant nor as varied as some I’ve seen but there is a hint of blue in one of those outer bands that doesn’t really show up well in my photos, as the light was very dull this day. I figured they were still worth sharing for Fungi Friday.
12 Friday Feb 2021
Posted in fungi
In Britain, the fungi with the tongue-twisting scientific name Gloeophyllum sepiarium are known as Conifer mazegills, while in North America their common name is Rusty-gilled polypore. I blogged about these same fungi, on a wooden railing on the local coastal path, two years ago (see Conifer mazegill, February 2019) but I couldn’t find them last year, mostly because the railing was too overgrown with bramble and ivy.
This year the contractors responsible for managing the vegetation along the path have been more ruthless in their cutting and strimming, and so the fungi have once again made an appearance. In 2019, the specimens I saw were very young and hadn’t developed their characteristic bracket-like structure so I thought it was worth posting about them again to show how marked the difference is.
09 Tuesday Feb 2021
As I walked through a local woodland yesterday, in light sleet and a biting wind, I was seduced by these gorgeous elfcups, punctuating the dull greens and dirty browns with their glorious pops of bright red.
And there were lots of them: tucked under draping fern fronds, nestled amongst lush mosses, almost every rotting log and every broken branch had its cup of scarlet (or ruby) red.
I’m not sure if anyone has ever checked, microscopically, to determine whether the elfcups in these woodlands are Scarlet (Sarcoscypha austriaca) or Ruby (Sarcoscypha coccinea).
And, though it would certainly be good to add them to the local biodiversity records, it was enough yesterday to simply feast my eyes on their magical elvish beauty.
earthstar 
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