This autumn will surely be remembered for the large number of very fresh red admiral butterflies, often seen feeding greedily on ivy flowers, along with a smaller number of commas, and a buzzing multitude of bees, wasps, hoverflies, droneflies, greenbottles and hornets. By the end of September, peacocks and brimstones had left the field to go into hibernation. As the ivy goes over, some of the admirals may make their way south, while others, the very last, will go into semi-hibernation in some sheltered spot, perhaps deep in the tangle. For them it’s only a light winter sleep for, being butterflies of the south, they are not habituated to northern winters and will wake up and fly on warm winter days, thus dissipating the energy they have built up on their autumnal feasting. Why are they called admirals? It’s an old name, probably a corruption of ‘admirables’.
After a September in which I saw very few fungi, things were hotting up in the first days of October. The massed pinky-beige mushrooms you may have seen under the young trees on the way to the Surgery, were birch brittlegills, russula betularum. This fungus infects the roots of the young trees, helping them to obtain trace elements from the soil, while also tapping the tree’s supply of sugar and water. The emerging mushrooms are there to liberate spores; they are the equivalent of apples on a tree. This root association is an example of the quiet way one organism helps another, one that probably began with the first land plants. Still on fungi, I have heard reports of parasol mushrooms in a field opposite Cobbs. This is one of our tallest mushrooms, rather Disney-esque, with scaly caps up to the size of a saucer on long, scaly stems with a ring round the middle. The young specimens are more the shape of a chicken drumstick, and they are best to eat at this stage. You can cook them like schnitzels. But you need to be sure of identification since there is a look-alike, the shaggy parasol, which can cause upset tummies! Wild fungi are notorious for toxic lookalikes!
Sometimes the least-likely habitats can produce surprises. A big pile of well-rotted manure by the side of a field was topped by a mini-forest of a leafy plant that turned out to be fig-leaved goosefoot, a species I’ve only ever seen once or twice. All right, it’s no one’s idea of a beauty, but it’s the surprise that counts!
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