Guessing at Fungi, and a Sly Visitor!

If you've been reading my blog in the past few months you will know that I love fungi, but it's really a very recent thing that was kickstarted last autumn, when I was looking for birds (unsuccessfully) in a local wood, and suddenly noticed I was surrounded by autumn fungi, of all shapes and sizes. Then it turned into an obsession when I was in a German wood and found fungi in red, yellow, green and purple, and all kinds of shapes and textures. From then on, I've been noticing fungi everywhere.


I can't remember why I never noticed fungi before this autumn, as I was always out birdwatching before that in places where fungi might be found. I think it was something to do with an idea I had about most fungi being brown and white mushrooms that all looked the same and weren't very interesting. I knew there were more different shapes and colours and textures, but I thought you had to be an expert to find those ones, and you'd only get to that point after getting really good at looking at the brown mushrooms. However, I now realise this is absolutely not true- once you begin looking out for fungi you will start to realise that some of the commonest species of fungi are some of the most brightly coloured, strangest in shape, and weirdest in texture! I'm going to go on to show you some examples that I found in the past couple of months at my local patch during my weekly bird-counting visits- despite the bright colours of some of it, I might have overlooked if I hadn't had my eyes open for fungi.


First, a quick note: fungi is awesome to look at, but even species that look really distinctive can be strangely hard to identify. I found this out with my Meadow Coral/Yellow Stagshorn confusion in the Germany post I linked above, and from some correspondence I had with the excellent Mark Baldwin at Wildlife Online (http://www.wildlifeonline.me.uk/) I learned that photographing fungi where it grows may not be enough to always be sure of a positive ID- you may need to photograph the gill structure as well, or cut it in half to look at the structure inside, or for some of the 'brown mushrooms' I mention above, you might even need to taste the fungus's secretion! (Note: do NOT do this unless you are an expert!!! I certainly won't be trying it for a while!) The identification book for fungi that I use (which Mark also recommends), is Mushrooms by Roger Phillips, which I have on long-term loan from my dad, but I really must get my own copy ^^- this book includes how common a fungus is which is really useful (and also how poisonous/good to eat a fungus is, which is just interesting!). To back this up, when I think I've IDed something I use the Hampshire Fungus Recording Group website that I mention at the end of this post, and if there's not many records of it I reconsider the plausibility of my ID. I may also do a google image search on a species I think I've found, especially if it looked close but was a slightly different colour or shape than in the picture in the book, as fungi are widely variable in colour and shape (some with age, some...just to be annoying, I think XD) and an image search should show you several variations of the same species.


Now: on to the fungi!

I think these interesting little things are most likely to be Common Jellyspot, even though most of the pictures I saw of Jellyspot were more orange than these various shades of pink and maroon! I love the huge variety of shapes, sizes and textures that were all on the same log. The incredible smoothness, curvyness and shininess looks like some sort of modern art. Looking back at these photos now, I kind of wish I'd poked them with a stick to see if they were as squashy as they look! In the 4th photo down is what looks like one that's been squashed, so maybe they are.

These are both the same one- you can see in the top one how it seems to melt into the tree, and in the second one how high the dome is. I love this one because of how wet and jelly-like it looks, as if it's sort of melted down over the bark! Unlike the Jellyspot (and most other fungi I seem to see), this one was on its own. This was hard to ID but I think it might be White Milking Bonnet? Heeding Mark's advice about the gill structure, and also because I wanted to see what the stem was like under the cap, I took the following photo:

I had to make it bigger than the others as it's one of my favourite photos I've ever taken! :D

Even though this photo came out really nicely, I'm not experienced enough to actually use the gill structure to verify ID yet. I think the White Milking Bonnet is a subspecies of Milking Bonnet, and there aren't as many records of White Milking Bonnet in Hampshire as there are Milking Bonnet, but it's tricky with subspecies. This was a really hard one to get even a tentative ID on so if anyone knows about Milking Bonnet-type fungi or has another ID suggestion for my melting white mushroom, let me know! :)

This little bright one was a relatively easy; it's a Yellow Brain fungus! I couldn't have thought of a better name myself. Again, these are photos of the same one from different angles.

This one was an odd one. It looks quite like the Jelly Spot without any of the colour, but I found a photo of a fungus that looked like it in the suggested images while looking at google search results for the Yellow Brain- clicking into it showed it was called the Crystal Brain. Despite the name, as you can see it's not really that similar looking to the Yellow Brain, and the Latin names (Tremella mesenterica and Myxarium nucleatum) suggest they are not closely related at all. (Even fungi that do look alike aren't necessarily related, of course!) Crystal was the closest ID I could find for the fungi in the photo, but weirdly Crystal Brain wasn't in Roger Phillips' fungi guide at all, not even under the Latin name. But when I searched the name in the Hampshire fungi site, there were many records. Does anyone know why it might not have been in the book? Very odd, and it's a good thing the name is similar to the Yellow Brain or I might never have even had an idea what it might be!

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The more interested I get in fungi, the more I see it everywhere! And to an extent, the same thing is happening with signs of mammals. As I wrote about in this post, I've been keeping notes about signs of mammals I see for the National Mammal Database, and my local patch is no exception. Warning in case you're eating dinner: poo pictures to follow!


Up at the top of my patch there's a railway line surrounded by scrubby vegetation, and back in January I detected a sly visitor up there! Unlike most mammals, you can sometimes detect this one with your sense of smell. Walking along the field margin next to the railway line, I smelled a distinctive, spicy, peppery odour that can only mean one animal- a fox! And aside from the smell, there were various visual signs.

 My local patch is very popular with dog walkers, and unfortunately a large number of them don't clean up their dog mess, so dog would be the main confusion species for these droppings. However as you can see from the closeup, there are feathers and what looks like crunched up bones in this dropping, not something you'd generally find in the poo of a dog fed on dog food. Plus when I was taking this photo, I noticed that the smell was...actually not as bad as you'd expect from a dog! While dog poo really stinks (and it makes my patch a bit unpleasant on a hot summers day, I can tell you!) this poo merely smelled like more of the fox smell, which wasn't unbearably unpleasant. I haven't included badger as a confusion species for this despite the size being similar, because I've seen no evidence of badgers at my patch or in the area at all, and don't think it's likely. But as I mentioned in the post I linked at the start of this section, badger poo doesn't really seem to have a smell.

I also found these nearby: 

Considering that the fox droppings had feathers in them, and these Woodpigeon feathers have been broken off by the shaft, I suspect that someone caught a pigeon and ate at least some of it near here! A sign you can use to tell if a mammal removed the feathers from a kill rather than a bird of prey is if the feathers are bedraggled, which can be due to the saliva of the animal and the fact that they sometimes chew the feathers. However in this case I think they're bedraggled because of the rain. The feathers in fox poo show a much more likely connection.

And finally, I found what looked like trails a fox-sized animal would make while pushing through the undergrowth: 

I was glad to find so many signs of my sly visitor! I don't know if any foxes have a territory nearby, and I've never seen or heard one in the area near my patch (it's near the suburban neighbourhood where I live, and I've never had any reason to believe there are urban foxes about), so it's possible this fox was just passing through. I did smell the foxy odour on a couple more visits since this, but never found so many clear signs again. This was all found a few months ago, I wonder where the fox is now?

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It's funny- the more I look for different types of nature, the more I realise the value of educated guessing. You may not know 100% what you're looking at all the time, but you can get better at guessing, while waiting until you know more, or perhaps meet someone who knows more who can help you. For example, when I first was contacted by Mark Baldwin at Wildlife Online (linked at the top of this post) he verified some speculation I'd been mulling over in my Badger Mysteries post about whether badgers ever kill pheasants and other gamebirds. Mark showed me research that says- they do! It was brilliant to find out for sure. :) Thanks Mark, and as I always say, if you can give me the answers to any of my questions or you want to correct me on something, then I would absolutely love to hear from you!

And as the Spring rolls in, while you're keeping your eyes on the trees and your ears open for birdsong, don't forget to look down to the ground and keep your nose open too! ;)

Amorous Activities in the Pigeon Family

This is sort of a continuation to my last post about early signs of Spring caused by the mild winter, but only sort of, as hopefully I will show! On a walk about a week ago, I found this:

This is a Woodpigeon's egg, which has been predated. If it had hatched naturally it would have broken into two halves due to the way a baby bird pecks around an egg to escape it using its egg-tooth. And according to my trusty Helm Identification Guide 'Tracks & Signs of the Birds of Britain and Europe', a predator such as a weasel would smash the whole egg up when it ate it. The hole in this otherwise intact eggshell shows that it was predated by a bird, such as a corvid.


The reason I said that this is only sort of a sign of early Spring is that Woodpigeons (and other pigeon species such as Collared Dove) are known to breed at all times of year. They can do this because, unlike most passerines, they can regurgitate food to feed to their babies in a substance known as pigeon milk, meaning as long as there's food for the adults there's food for the babies. Other species of birds, such as Blue Tits, need soft food such as caterpillars and insects for their babies, so they have to breed at the right time of year for that food.


However, weather still matters and I doubt Woodpigeons would have been breeding last January. It was just too cold. And even with this year's mild winter, if this egg hadn't been predated I wouldn't have expected it to survive. Woodpigeons build very basic nests of just a few twigs in a tree, and it's been SO windy and rainy this winter that the nest would have probably blown down.


Speaking of breeding behaviour in the pigeon family, today I was looking out into my garden and saw a pair of Collared Doves start mating! Then, as if that wasn't enough, only a few minutes later there was a pair of Woodpigeons who also began to mate, but this time I got the chance to see a little bit of their courtship too. What first drew my attention was one pigeon began pecking at the beak of the other, and then stuck its beak right inside the other's; it was being fed on pigeon milk! I'd never seen anything like it before. I guessed the one doing the feeding must have been the male, and sure enough when they began to mate it was this bird that jumped on top. Before mating they sort of snuggled up together, with the male puffing up his breast feathers to look bigger.


I've talked about courtship feeding before, and how I've seen females in both Blue Tits and Carrion Crows use a wing-fluttering display to show they want to be fed by the male. The female pecking the male's beak was different though, and reminded me more of the Herring Gull chicks when they pecked their parent's beak on the red pecking spot to get them to regurgitate. Only in the case of the adult Herring Gulls, they were regurgitating a large lump of food onto the ground for the chicks, while the Woodpigeon behaviour I saw suggests that their young take food straight from the parents' beaks. Well, the name 'pigeon milk' does suggest liquid! The male Woodpigeon was showing the female how well he'd be able to feed babies when it came to the time, as well as how well he would feed the female while she was laying and incubating. It looks like more eggs are coming in the future, so let's hope we don't get any more storms!


Woodpigeons are such fascinating birds to watch, especially as you can often observe their behaviour very closely when they are in gardens and parks. We have a ground feeder in our garden and I've noticed how dominant Woodpigeons have a sort of 'lurch forward and wing-flap' gesture that they do to scare off other birds feeding on it. Or at least, it's supposed to! It works on other Woodpigeons and on Collared Doves; they all back off. But Starlings tend to ignore the gesture completely! Starlings may be a good bit smaller than pigeons but they aren't easily intimidated. And perhaps pigeon body language doesn't translate well outside the family?


I hope I'll have the chance to write more about Woodpigeons in the future, because I've seen all kinds of interesting interactions among them. I've seen them squaring up, bowing to each other, standing up as tall as possible, mimicking each other's behaviour...what do these behaviours mean? To guess at that I'd need to watch them more closely, which I plan to do in the future. Since writing this blog I've started watching bird behaviour more closely than ever before, and I feel like I'm finding out new things all the time! As always, please do submit stories of your own about bird behaviour- have you seen any pigeon courtship this winter? If so, leave me comment and tell me all about it! :)

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This is unrelated to pigeons, but on the same walk that I found that eggshell, I saw this:

On the left is a small animal hole (I'd say the photo is about actual size), and in the middle and bottom you can see the shells of seeds. I don't know what species lives here but I'm sure its either a mouse or a vole, as they both eat seeds. Leaving all the seed shells outside reminds me a bit of our hamster, who tends to spit his empty shells outside of his bed! Of course a small animal that lives in a hole doesn't really need to hide its seed shells, as it is safe inside and the hole is so obvious anyway.


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And finally, and back on the pigeons, here's a slightly disturbing pop cultural reference to pigeon milk! I'm a big fan of the game series Animal Crossing, in which there's a pigeon character named the Brewster who owns a coffee shop. After you get to know him a bit, he offers you some pigeon milk to put in your coffee. Um........:O

Someone in this game's development had a sense of humour alright!

Source: http://soapboxview.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/the-animal-crossing-new-leaf-photo-post.html

...But as you can see from the picture, in the game your character seems to really enjoy the pigeon milk-infused coffee. So I guess it's not so bad!

Non-bird nature in Crab Wood

Last Sunday I took a trip down to Crab Wood, an area of ancient woodland that is managed traditionally using coppicing (and named after its crab apple trees!).  I’ve been birdwatching there for a few years now, but this year visiting has yielded few birds, especially as I keep visiting at quiet times for birds, like early autumn and mid-winter, when I’ve found the birds tend to be quiet.  I never got around to going during the breeding season this year!  Oh well, next time.

The birds may have been quiet, but that didn’t mean there was nothing to see by any means.  The damp, autumnal weather had caused fungi to burst out all over the place, ranging from tiny, weeny mushrooms on the thinnest stalks, to huge brackets growing out of the ground, each one more than a foot across.  I don’t know much about fungi at all, but there were two species present I could confidently identify: the first were the puffballs, little round balls growing out of the ground.  Some were unripe, but others when nudged with my foot released puffs of powdery spores.  There’s no need to feel guilty for squashing a puffball with your foot, all a ripe puffball wants is to be stepped on so its spores will be spread!  And they pop back into shape straight away, anyway.

The second one I knew was the one I believe is called something like King Alfred’s Cakes, which is a black, burnt-looking, roundish blob that grows on dead or alive wood.  It’s named after a legend of King Alfred being asked to look after somebody’s cakes and neglecting them so that they burned...and there’s probably more to the legend than that, but I couldn’t tell you, I’m afraid!  Though I should really know, as I’m from Winchester and King Alfred was the ancient King of Wessex, and there’s a statue of him right in the town. ^^ Anyway, the strangest thing about these fungi is they are quite flammable.  I remember back when I was a kid and was a member of Wildlife Watch, the local Wildlife Trust’s children’s group, one of the leaders lit one on fire to show us how it burned.  It’s absolutely fascinating, as you’d think of most fungi being quite moist to the touch, like a mushroom.  I didn’t go around touching the fungi at Crab Wood as I didn’t want to damage them, or get my hands gooey and/or poison-y (!!) but wouldn’t it be interesting if the King Alfred’s Cakes were dry and hard?  Anyone know?

The rest of the fungi was a complete mystery to me, but there was such a variety of shapes, sizes, textures and colours that I really, really wished I’d remembered to bring my camera!  Sadly I didn’t, so instead I will describe some of the other types I remember seeing:

•  huge, wavy, light brown brackets growing out of the ground in a group- Edit (22/11/13) After some research I have IDed these as Giant Polypore!
•    small, orange squiggles on tree- Edit (22/11/13): Wrinkled Crust is a possibility, though not sure any more.
•  red and gooey looking, growing alone in a cleft at the base of a dead tree;
•    bronze-black with rounded caps;
•  small and white with thick stems;
•  tiny, with long, very thin stems;
•   a single, brown bracket growing on a tree with a texture like a bread roll;
•   a group of brown brackets with white borders;
•   small and pink, some with grooves around the edges, some without;
• a single, large bracket which had coated the area around it with white spores.

My favourite of all, though, was a ball-shaped fungi I found on the ground that was covered all over in small, soft spines.  It was like a sweet-chestnut shell, though more the size of a conker shell, or like a tiny hedgehog that had rolled into a ball.  I gave it a gentle nudge with my foot and found it was attached to the ground with some sort of stalk, though you couldn’t see one among the leaf litter.  There were several around the area, of a range of sizes but mostly smaller than a conker shell, but I didn’t see any more in the whole of the wood.  Fungi seem to be strange that way!

My dad has a book about fungi which I borrowed when I got home, hoping to identify some of the fungi I’d seen, but because I didn’t have photos the only one I was able to indentify was the spiny ball.  It’s called a Spiny Puffball, which presumably means it’s a relative of the puffballs I’d seen earlier in the visit, but a gently nudge didn’t make it release any pores so maybe it works differently from those puffballs?  (I also found out the species name for the bursting puffballs: Soft Puffball.)

As for other wildlife, I was pleased to find...another badger sett!!  I’ve found setts before, but never one in Crab Wood, and in fact didn’t know there were any badgers there.  It’s not near any of the main paths, and it was only by exploring some of the smaller paths that go deeper into the trees that I found it.  Like the other sett I know about, there were several holes in a relatively small area, and the top was covered in loose earth, but this time there were impressively sized lumps of chalk in the earth as well- it must be hard work removing them, but the badgers were clearly equal to the task!  I didn’t find any dung this time, or badger hairs, but there was a large piece of dead tree lying over the sett and it was covered in dozens of sets of scratch marks, no doubt from the huge digging claws the inhabitants of the sett all boast.  That was a new thing to see!

On my way out of the wood, I came across another species I’d never seen in the wood before: hornets.  There was a long crack in the bark of a tree, and hornets were flying in and out all the time.  They were at least the size of a queen wasp, and I used to think hornets just looked like big wasps, but actually their markings are different.  They are less obviously stripy than wasps, and instead most of their abdomen is shiny yellow, with a little maroon on their heads and sides.  Another striking thing I noticed about them was that they didn’t come straight over to investigate me, as wasps tend to.  I really hate the way wasps get in your face, but the hornets couldn’t care less about me watching them, concentrating instead on what they were doing inside the tree.  And they didn’t buzz at all.  Their nests are big papery structures like a wasp’s nest, and the crack in the tree certainly wasn’t like that, so maybe they are going to overwinter in the tree.  Does anyone know how hornets spend the winter: do they all die except the queen like wasps, or do more of them overwinter?  I’d be fascinated to know!

Also, one important thing to remember if you encounter hornets: they may be bigger than wasps, but their sting is no worse!  It is good to think of that if you see any of these massive beasties. ^^

Recording signs of mammals for the National Mammal Atlas

Note: This post contains photos of dead animals and poo. Just a heads up in case you're eating your dinner!

At the start of this month I was in Wales, and when I came back I was determined to write about the wildlife...but I have epic writer's block on that post. So to try and shift it, here's a post about looking for mammals!

Recently I became aware of the National Mammal Atlas, a project by the Mammal Society to try and map the distribution of every British mammal species, and being someone who loves recording records online (I already submit to Birdtrack, BTO's garden bird count, goingbirding.co.uk, and seasonal counts such as the Big Garden Birdwatch and the Big Butterfly Count) I was very interested in the project. They want every single record, from rare species to common ones like Rabbit, Brown Rat and Grey Squirrel. As well as reports of living mammals they accept reports of dead animals, meaning roadkill can be a useful record, and they want records of signs of mammals, such as burrows, droppings, footprints or mole hills. As a birdwatcher I sometimes see mammals, but if I'm lucky I might see two species in one trip. So I decided to go on a walk and see how many signs of animals I could find.

Since the weather has been gorgeous recently I decided to go to a good place for butterflies, Stockbridge Down, and sure enough the place was alive with them: Meadow Brown, Gatekeeper, the lovely Marbled White, the tiny Small Heath and the cute, bright orange Small Skipper. Best of all was the large, lurid orange fast-flying Dark Green Fritillary. The Down is also fantastic for birds, and though it's getting to a quiet time of year for songbirds there was still plenty to see, including a male Blackcap popping in and out a tree with beakfuls of food, a blindingly yellow male Yellowhammer singing from the top of a bush, and a flock of 5 or 6 Mistle Thrushes (maybe a family?) flying by.

But what about the mammals? By the time I arrived at the Down I unfortunately already had records for two species from the drive over. I say unfortunately because of course they were roadkill: a Grey Squirrel about halfway through the journey, and rather heartbreakingly, a Badger, very close to the entrance to the Down. I've never seen a living Badger before (though I have found signs of them) and I hate seeing them dead on the roads. Then I had barely stepped through the gate of the nature reserve before I found a third mammal, a Common Shrew. This is another animal I've never seen alive, despite it being incredibly common in Britain; I expect it's probably nocturnal like a lot of small rodents. This, of course, is why records of dead animals are useful to the Mammal Society- otherwise they'd end up with far more comprehensive records for diurnal animals than nocturnal animals. Anyway, here's a picture of the Shrew.

 

Poor little thing. Ask anyone: I have a soft spot for small furry creatures. ^^ You can tell this is a shrew by its very pointy nose (unlike the rounded nose of a vole) and its hairy tail (unlike the bald tail of a mouse) that is short compared with the body. Finally, the teeth of a shrew are tipped with red, as you can see in this close-up:

I would love to find out why the teeth are red, so if anyone knows, let me know. 

As for how I know this is a Common Shrew and not one of the other kinds, I confess it was mostly process of elimination: the Common Shrew is far more numerous and therefore it is most likely to be one. The fur colour (warm brown rather than dark grey) and size (about the size of a mouse rather than smaller) also helped me come to this conclusion. 

How it died is a bit of a mystery to me, as being killed by a predator would seem the most likely cause of death, but why would the predator then leave its kill? But then on the Mammal Society information page on Common Shrews, I found this: 'They are often found abandoned by the predator..since a liquid produced from glands on the skin is foul tasting.' So that seemed plausible. And in the first photo you can see what looks like it might be the fatal wound, on the back of the Shrew's neck, which is where a predator would bite to kill its prey.

As I continued my walk, I found mole hills, and burrows covered with rabbit droppings, as well as the only living mammal I saw on my walk: a lone, alert-looking rabbit! Rabbit droppings are easy to identify, but later on I found some poo that caused a bit more confusion.

 

As you can hopefully see in the close-up, these droppings are packed with beetle shells, which made me think 'Badger!' straight away. The reason for that is I remember when I was a Wildlife Explore (young RSPB member) we found some poo like that on a field trip, and the leaders said it was Badger poo. I did a little research all the same, and then began to be unsure, because I found out that Badgers make latrines near their setts and that's where most of their dung will go. This was found out on the grass, not in a latrine and nowhere near a sett, so I started to look for suggestions for alternative possibilities online. It seems that beetle shells can be found in Hedgehog dung, but to rule that one out size is the main factor, and though I didn't measure the droppings (must bring a ruler next time!) compared with the size of a Hedgehog, I think they were far too big. Domestic dog can be ruled out immediately because the poo didn't smell, and dogs don't tend to eat loads of beetles. Same with sheep, which do graze on part of the Down, but they certainly don't eat beetles. Fox poo can also be ruled out because that has a peppery, pungent smell (I've had the dubious pleasure of finding Fox poo before) which this didn't have at all.

So for a while I was unsure about what I had found here, until I noticed something else which you should be able to see in the close-up: there's some long, white hairs stuck to the droppings! I'm almost sure they are Badger hairs, and I already know Badgers are in the area (thanks to my sad find near the entrance of the reserve earlier) so I've reported this to the Mammal Atlas as a field sign of Badgers. Just in case, though, I've attached a photo so the record can be checked. I did the same for the Common Shrew, though not for the mole hills or dead squirrel, those are pretty easy even for a mammal novice such as myself. ^^

The best thing about trying this experiment out was realising how much I might normally miss: if I wasn't thinking about looking for mammals, I might not even have noticed the shrew or the Badger droppings, or the mole hills, which even though they are a common sight, are a sure sign that an animal barely anyone ever sees is present in the area! So, although I only saw that one Rabbit, I also found Badger, Mole and Common Shrew, as well as that squirrel on the journey, and therefore had 5 species to submit to the Atlas. And I learned some new things about Common Shrew and Badgers!

To anyone who wants to submit your own results, follow this link: http://www.mammal.org.uk/ and go to 'submit records' on the left. You can submit any mammals you have seen in Britain since 2000, as long as you know the date and the location you saw it, which you pinpoint on a map. When doing this, it helped me to remember whereabouts the animal was found in relation to a landmark: for example, the dead squirrel was on the road near the entrance to Sparsholt College, so that made it easier to find on the map. At some point I want to go back and submit some mammals I've seen in the past.

Hopefully Wales post will be up next! Because I really did see some awesome things there...