As we leave the car park, others disappear into the trees, carrier bags in hand. It’s clear we’ve come to find different things. Almost immediately a mustard-yellow butterfly with black wing tips hurtles past, driven by the breeze, and briefly circles at a distance before disappearing along the gravel track. It’s getting late for a clouded yellow to be on the wing, but what else can it be? Further on, we come across a solitary peacock butterfly enjoying the calmer air of a sunlit clearing, and spot a green shield bug conspicuous on the silver bark of a birch log.
Days of rain and warm temperatures have brought a profusion of fungi. It’s almost impossible to walk in some places without crushing them under foot. Conically topped species, sometimes in troops numbering many hundreds, are dotted around tree roots and in among bracken. We do not record many that we could pick for the table, perhaps because they’re already in those now bulging carrier bags we glimpse again from time to time.
We pause to explore the riches offered by a fallen tree. Broken four metres from the ground, the hollow stem is black-brown where its rotten core has been darkened by the water it has soaked up. The trunk is coated with mosses and liverworts, and a colony of small fungi is sprouting just above the base. Full grown, they’re pure white but the smallest in the group are grey-topped and almost hidden in the shadows.
Many other fungi are growing along the earthbound limbs close by. One springs from the bark all by itself. It’s slate-grey and smaller than a matchstick whose bent form it exactly replicates. On the upper surface, a long line of jelly fungi stretches out, rather pinkish, many in tight clusters of three so that their circular shape becomes triangular. Cup shaped, they appear smooth but have knobbly backs. In death, this tree is giving life to many, but those benefitting will ensure that one day there will be no trace of it.
