I’m reading David Joy’s 2019 book Discover Your Woods, Trees in the Dales so this afternoon I had a walk around Bilberry Wood here as Nethergill Farm. There are pines, larches and firs but the only broadleaved species that I notice is rowan.
Rushes and sphagnum moss grow in the damper areas, with heather and polytrichum mosses on drier hummocks.
At the more exposed western corner of the wood, a swathe of pines has been flattened, the fallen trees revealing that they were shallow rooted.
The only bird that I notice is a wren, flitting about amongst the ground vegetation and it appears that a wren spotted my iPhone which I’d set to take a time-lapse sequence, flashing on the screen for a single frame.
There are ferns, bracken and a few brambles but the ground layer consists predominantly of various kinds of mosses. Tormentil straggles around, dotting the ground with its four-petalled yellow flowers.
There are a few fungi and, as the name of the wood suggests, plenty of bilberry.