I went in search of hazel leaves

The Woodland Trust was asking on Twitter if there were leaves still on hazel trees. There are some on the Boggy Brae hazel but I went "up the back" by the burn where there are older hazel plants to see what state they were in.

 Loads on young trees (left) and still plenty on older plants (below)

Poking around by the burn, which is splashy after all the rain we've had (which, for comparison, is a mere drip compared with what they've had up in the Highlands over the last couple of days),

and enjoying the rich Assam tea look it has in less tumbly parts of its wee ravine,

I came upon a robin. Actually, I think the robin came upon me. It certainly seemed to checking me out to see if I was turning up something tasty for it. So here's a game of

Spot the Robin

(click on the pics to enlarge)

Are you sure you didn't bring some mealworms?

Making my way back by this path–the burn and the wooded hillside to my right and the Boggy Brae garden to my left–I enjoyed the colours and crinkliness of what I know as Dog Lichen. I believe the dog part of the name means common, so common lichen, otherwise called Peltigera horizontalis/Flat-Fruited Dog Lichen, both by the burn and on rocks and trees back in the garden:

This sample is on one of the old railway sleepers
that the half-collapsed bridge is made of

The sample above and the one to the right are Boggy Brae samples.

Last of all, before coming in for a bowl of spicy lentil soup, I enjoyed the last of this year's Den Rose blossoms, a small flower, and very wet like everything else, but bonny for all that.

An early welly wander between showers

 The clouds were scudding by fast this morning when I wandered up the garden and over the fence into the field to watch what was visible of the sunrise.

There would clearly be some more rain soon but before it came I climbed over the forest fence, stepped over the burn...

...and found a new moss: Greater Fork Moss (Dicranum majus), a relative, I suppose, of Dicranum scoparium that grows in the garden.

Dicranum scoparium
Broom Fork Moss

Where I stepped over the burn is quite narrow. just a little further down, where it turns to run steeply downhill and into the sea, it is wider and, at the moment, gushier and noisier.

Walking back across the field I noticed this goo slime mould, or whatever it is. There were
several patches of it.

Just before doing my scissor step over the garden fence, I found a typical Boggy Brae sycamore leaf with its decoration of Sycamore Tarspot fungus, which is a sign of clean air. I like the brown and black together, and the different brown tones of the paler gilled fungus on the brown leaf above.



My trundle down the garden included checking up on the ever larger crop of Hare's Foot Inkcaps (Coprinopsis lagopus) on an old compost heap. On the young yew tree next to the heap I spotted a single berry. Couldn't see any others.

Yew berry

<< Hare's Foot Inkcaps

A stream scramble

autumn colours

beech leaf bank

looking up a beech trunk

mossy rocks

An old wall

the top fifth of a silver birch tree; the rest is trunk

wee red fungus

moss covered pile of branches – hedgehog homes?

An old rowan tree

a jelly fungus

A bit of stream

and a bit of splash

light in water

light, water and bubbles

BoggyBrae streamside or Spot the Frog