A bumble about in the woods

I went for a bumble about in the woods up the hill the other day. Nine years ago, when we moved to the Boggy Brae (and I've just realised, saying that, that I've lived in the Boggy Brae house for longer than I've lived in any other house in my life), trees up the hill were being harvested. The lower part of the wooded area was left in a right mess. We contacted the logging contractors to ask them to hoik muckle hunks of tree out of the burn that runs along the back of us lest it should overflow. They did. Since then a lot of trees near the burn have fallen over, making it, ahem, interesting to go for a stroll there. I tend to follow deer tracks but roe deer can get through smaller spaces than I can so my walks turn into boggy wood bumbling: under tree, over tree, bumbling free. You get the idea.

Up hill, I have watched first the foxgloves, then young birches, and now replanted crop trees various growing all over the cleared area. There is a lot else too. Most of the plants and fungi in my garden have relatives in this wood.

On the birch trunk, the top one in the picture above, I found these little mushrooms growing in a crack in the bark. I don't know what they are yet and have left them there. I'll keep going to visit them for a while to see how they progress.

click on any photo to see it larger

On another fallen trunk, a pine, many mini-trees were growing out of it.

Its bark looks like this:

bark of a pine

Further along I edged along a trunk similar to these on the right but stouter. It was just as well it was stouter and a good bridge because it spanned a small ravine. All the sticky up side shoots were actually quite useful to jam my boots against for steadiness. I wanted to get a closer look at this fungus on yet another fallen tree. I couldn't get any closer. Well... possibly... but I decided not to.

another not ID-ed fingus

Down from my trunk treading, I then explored a marshy bit. It shows as a pond on some old maps but it's actually just a bog and the sides of the area are steep and skiddy, as I discovered. Scaly Male Ferns are very tough though and a big handful makes a useful rope for hanging on! In the marshy bit, I found the mushrooms shown below. I haven't managed to identify them yet either.

mushrooms in a marsh

transluscent cap

The spore print is a rich brown and they have a 'grassy' smell.

The tree from which this leaf comes has recently lost half its crown because of collapsing pines crashing through it. The leaves are a beautiful bright yellow-green in spring.

There's nothing like a bit of messy woodland for watching Life–and the deaths that help it along–doing its stuff.

A walk up the hill

I went for a walk up the hill the other day and this is what I saw.

 

<< Collected these and we ate them with macaroni cheese.

Lots of these. I think they are Russula ochroleuca (Ochre Brittlegill).
Edible apparently. In the woods, slugs eat them.

There were lots of other Russulas too such as these two below.

Russula under beech

The plan was to get up to the Sentinel Tree. I didn't think there was a way through here >>

So I carried on looking at mushrooms.

Picked up some litter that some picnicking slob had left behind long ago :(

Why do people do that?

<< Didn't think I'd get through to the Sentinel Tree that way either.

This one is an Amanita though not sure which one. 

Gave up trying to reach the Sentinel Tree but I'll get there one day. I sat down under the beech tree where I found these and listened to the water  in the burn for a while.

More drains and a new liverwort

This drain runs roughly north to south along the retaining wall back terrace and turns at a right angle round the corner below.

I've removed most of the ferns so I can clear the drain

Making the water that seeps almost continuously down the hill run round the terrace edge rather than straight across it and into the wash-house means we have a dry(ish) threshold. It also turns out that maintaining drains is fun because you find stuff. I found more Trailing St.John's-wort (Hypericum humifusum) and more Toad Rushes (Juncus bufonius). See left; a Toad Rush is 'bridging' the ditch at the right-hand side of the pic. Most importantly though, I found a new species of liverwort, one of the Riccia genus. I'm sending a sample off to be identified and recorded properly.

It's quite tricky, I found, to photograph a small liverwort in situ when its 'situ' is a more or less vertical piece of ditch bank on the ditch side farther from a retaining wall. The exercise requires an old camping mat to prevent one from getting soaked lying on wet ground for a start. I suppose I could have just got soaked, being so close to home but I probably would have given up sooner in that case.

I found an old stone painting of Toadlet's and used it to mark opposite the spot of my discovery. As it happens I found more of the same Riccia as I cleared out the ditch further.

Some animal wildlife kept me company: this tiny moth decided to flutter about in the wheelbarrow into which I was chucking ditch dirt.

A caterpillar on the wall was charging around (in caterpillar terms) for quite a while among the hornwort,

Caterpillar and hornwort

and a rather weary looking Angle-shades moth  decided to walk up my arm at one point. I repositioned him on a lungwort leaf where he stayed for the remainder of my ditch digging time.

The progress of an Orange Birch Bolete

                                          From this on 16 September >>

to what's below at the end of the month:

Leccinum versipelle (Orange Birch Bolete)

My, admittedly not large, hand for scale.