That thing on the cover page - it shone like silica. I guess it's a fragment of a shell. I couldn't tell.
Or indeed focus, by the looks of it.
Nor does this come out well.
It was some kind of... chrysalis? In a nicely prepared sort of... nest? On the underside of a piece of bark that I pulled off a bit of dead wood. Looks like there's something smaller in the top right corner.
I did get some moving images - all on dead wood, I saw nothing in the soil from High Wood. But then it had been in a plastic bag for two days.
The virtual inevitability of seeing things on wood does suggest the richness of this as a habitat for mesofauna. But also soil is porous and you try to pull it apart so that you can see what's there, but the creatures could be inside little pills or underneath.
When I was out the other day, I was looking at the hard frost and thinking how cool it would be to look at the crystals. Ah! There's a true story of a man who did microphotographs of snowflakes and showed that they are unique... let me unearth it.... Yes - Wilson A. Bentley! Check out the link - it shows some of the photos.
All I managed was this.
Great story about Snowflake Bentley!! And yes, you might be right about the object being some sort of "chrysalis". And the little white creatures might be springtails but can't tell for sure.