The swallows lingered into mid‑October, the young hanging around in the stables, clumsily practising flight. I began to wonder if they would stay, if the system was somehow broken. Maybe I feel this way because the great oak of our family has fallen. My grandfather has died, just before turning 101, sharp of mind to the end. But order continues and the swallows too have now left, leaving the skies to the skeins of geese.
I muck out the stable and fill hay nets before heading out on a walk. The bale I break into has a dark singe mark within, as if a hot saucepan has burned all the way through. It was probably a bit damp when baled, which can cause fermentation and temperatures that can rise to combustion point at over 65C. Sometimes the whole stack might ignite. The hay harvest was poor this year, with low yields bringing scarcity and price rises.
Out on the tracks, I’m looking for clouded yellow butterflies, migrants from north Africa and southern Europe. They stay here as late as November. My eye finds something else bright: a frilly golden tutu of fungus adorning an oak tree. Known as “chicken of the wood”, it is a bracket fungus, ranging in colour from sulphur yellow to egg yolk. Its shape is perhaps reminiscent of a very fancy chicken, with cascading folds of ornamental feathers, but it is in fact named for its flesh. Breaking a section away, I can see why. The texture, colour and smell of the inside of the fungus is exactly like cooked chicken.
It is edible too, a source of protein, although it can cause stomach upset in some people. When it grows on a yew tree, it should not be consumed, possibly due to it absorbing toxins from the tree, but maybe because it is hard to remove all the bits of poisonous yew from its layers. I leave it for the hairy fungus beetle, a brown fuzzy specimen which eats fungi.
The clouded yellow butterflies have perhaps gone too. I need to let go of summer, and settle into the landscape now ablaze with red, bronze and gold.
• Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian’s Country Diary, 2018-2024 is published by Guardian Faber; order at guardianbookshop.com and get a 15% discount
