November 2025 Ramsbury Nature Notes by Peter Marren

Honey fungus

This bounteous autumn continues. One of the sounds this year is the pit-a-pat of acorns falling from the laden boughs or, in the case of a walk we did on the coat-tails of Storm Amy, whizzing through the air like bullets. The hollow-way through which we usually reach Hens Wood was blocked by a series of fallen trees that seem to have come down like skittles. This is a great year for chestnuts, not conkers which seem to have been no better than average, but delicious, sweet chestnuts ripening inside their prickly cases. Some of them were conker-sized, and most were plump and ripe, and falling in quantity. You could fill a large basket from a single mature tree.

This is the best autumn for mushrooms and toadstools in quite a while. Honey fungus is the most prominent, pushing up from rotting stumps in dense masses, first deep brown and club-shaped, then broadening into honey-coloured flattish caps with dark scales. You don’t want honey fungus in a garden or an orchard where it can attack healthy trees, but in the woods it performs a key natural function, breaking down logs and stumps, and recycling their nutrients. There are many more mycorrhizal fungi about this year, the ones whose underground webs are entangled with those of trees. Tree and fungus feed one another, and I suspect these fungi are fruiting well because the sunshine of the summer produced masses of sugar that feeds the energy of fungal systems as well as the tremendous fruiting and nutting we have witnessed.

I was expecting more late bees and hoverflies on the masses of flowering ivy than I have seen. By early October there were still a few red admiral and large white butterflies about, and quite a few hornets. If you went out at night with a torch, preferably a red light that insects can’t see, I suspect you would also have seen a lot of moths, some of whose lives are extended into months through hibernation. There were reports of hummingbird hawkmoths visiting late flowers in gardens and they may try to hibernate rather than migrate south. If any emerge in the spring, it will be something new, and indicative, I suppose, of winter-warming and climate change.