The dappled markings of the speckled wood, resting on a bramble leaf, echo the dappled sunlight in the welcome shade of The Pinewoods, as we walk up from the Valley Gardens, Harrogate, on the hottest day since July.
Speckled Wood
Category: Woodland
Beech Backdrop
This morning at Newmillerdam I drew the fishing platform for the opening frame of my Ode to a Duck cartoon and photographed a beech tree for this background for the squirrel/wood pigeon duo. You can already sense the natural chemistry between them.
Southern Hawker
This southern hawker dragonfly, Aeshna cyanea, was hawking around by a sheltered path through the woodland at RHS Harlow Carr Gardens but obligingly perched on a rhododendron leaf, allowing us to photograph it. This is a male, distinguished by the three blue-spotted segments at the tip of its abdomen.
A nuthatch calls insistently as we take the path behind the Doric Temple.
These twisted trunks remind me of old olive trees, but I think that they’re Rhododendrons.
Giant Sequoia bark has a spongy texture, which acts as insulation in forest fires. Much as I like sequoias, I’m sorry to hear that large plantations of them are being planted on some Welsh hillsides: this might be an efficient way of taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere but it won’t do a lot for another key environmental problem, the loss of biodiversity.
Squirrels Behaving Oddly
Perhaps spring was the reason for the strange behaviour of a group of five grey squirrels, which we saw capering about under the beeches and oaks at Newmillerdam last February. We watched as they bounded playfully and rolled about on their backs. They weren’t bickering or chasing each as you might have expected at that time of year and they weren’t foraging or going through a grooming routine. They reminded me of children let loose in a soft play ball pool.
We couldn’t guess what they’re doing and nor could a dog, which stood motionless a few yards away, transfixed by their antics. Could that be a reason for their forest-floor frolics: to confuse predators?
If it had been the dog rolling around, I could have understood that, as they like to gather scents as a kind of badge of honour, but would squirrels do that?
Acorns
This mixed oak wood at the top end of Coxley Valley is typical of woods on Coal Measures. In the background there are planted conifers: crops of larch and Corsican pine have been planted here, adjacent to Earnshaw’s Saw Mill, although some of them have been badly damaged by grey squirrels.
Even on our short walk around the wood, there’s always something to see. We got a chance to squeeze in a quick visit a couple of days ago and I was determined not to stop to take photographs, but when I saw these frost-rimmed oak leaves, I couldn’t resist getting out my iPhone.
There are so many acorns this year that in places you crunch over them and they look like pea gravel strewn along the edges of the path. The resident greys haven’t been able to squirrel them away and the flock of wood pigeons, hanging around at the corner of the wood this morning, has come nowhere near making serious inroads into the enormous quantities on offer.
Wood pigeons are great acorn eaters but jays are the real specialists. We’ve often seen a pair of them flying from a large oak, crops bulging with acorns. On this morning’s walk we hear them screeching somewhere in the background but we’ve yet to spot them here, collecting and caching.
Berries are few and far between on the hollies, which provide some winter cover in the shrub layer of the wood.
There isn’t a lot of fungus around at the moment but I spotted these common earthballs, Scleroderma citrinum, growing amongst the leaf litter at the top corner of the wood.
What made this scrape amongst the roots of a larch tree?
- A squirrel? They’d usually make a neater job, they’re discrete in their excavations as they hide and recover acorns
- A rabbit? Apparently there are some in the wood, so it’s a possibility
- A fox? Again, you’d expect to see signs of them
- A badger? Well, yes, I’d go for badger because of the scatter of debris. To me it looks as if it must have been a robust animal doing the digging. There are smaller excavations dotted along the side of the path. I can imagine a badger snuffling and scraping on its way through the wood.
Woodland Mushroom
The fibrous scales on this small mushroom resemble those of the Blushing Wood Mushroom, Agaricus silvaticus, a common species that some writers say is good to eat, but there are similar-looking species that aren’t, so I won’t be giving it a try.
Alder
The alder is the nearest that we get to mangroves as it produces adventitious roots above ground which enable it to grow in very wet ground, even at the water’s edge. These female woody ‘cones’ are ripening and will attract seed-eating birds such as redpolls and siskins.
Polypore Bracket
I’m struggling to identify this polypore bracket fungus but I’m going for Smoky Bracket, Bjerkandera adusta, a common fungus on the dead wood of deciduous trees. Having said that, this sawn-off poplar hasn’t quite given up the ghost: it’s putting out new green shoots from epicormic buds beneath the bark.
With bracket fungi, it’s important to know what species of tree they are growing on. This is poplar, which has distinctive diamond-shaped lenticels (right), so another possibility is that this is the Poplar Bracket, Oxyporus populinus.
The Way through the Woods
Losing your way in the woods? My latest homemade birthday card.
YouTube version.
Bilberry Wood: The Movie #1
On our last visit to the Dales, I walked around Bilberry Wood in Langstrothdale, using my Olympus Tough TG-4 to take short movie shots of every plant and fungus that I found. So how am I going to put those 42 random shots together to make a coherent two-minute film?
The Freeform Project Panel in Adobe Premier Pro is proving useful: I can drag and drop thumbnails of the clips around the screen, so I’m arranging them in groups, such as habitats, flowers and mosses. Once I’ve got them in a suitable order they can go straight on to the Editing window and I can add titles and a commentary.
I’ve already scrolled through each clip and selected the best few seconds of each one, by adding an ‘In’ and an ‘Out’ point to each clip, so there shouldn’t be any redundant or out-of-focus footage in my first rough cut of the movie.