Oh this was fun. Crawling around in the copse to see what I could see.
I inspected some hollow trees - hoping to find mice. No mice but there was one neatly chewed little nut, in my pocket and unphotographed. The hollow trees make nice little homes.
Reminds me, I was reading in Rob Cowen's Common Ground (review: good but too much about humans) about how he took a hammock out into the woods to lie under the stars. Must get me a hammock as I don't fit in the tree hollows and can't climb up into yesterday's oak.
The fairy fingers excited me. I thought they were a kind of lichen... I think there's a lichen that looks like coral and is one of the signifying species for temperate rainforests... Ah yes, here it is, in Western Scotland. Unlikely in the East Midlands. I gained this coral lichen knowledge by reading Guy Shrubsole's Lost Rainforests of Britain - a book inspired by the trip to Wistman's Wood last summer.
Anyway, the fungi was still pretty thrilling. I thought how maybe Ian Wilson would have taken some in his test tube to look at under a microscope. When I touched it, and it was tough - felt like coral - the spores came off on my fingers.
As I was crawling along, I smelt a smell. Rob Cowen had talked of following the scent of fox. I didn't think I had ever smelt fox apart from when the dog rolled in Fox poo and when I met some baby foxes - who really did smell strongly. But at one point there was a definite whiff, picked up despite the cold and runny nose. I tracked it down to this trunk.
I looked around for hairs, prints, poo. Nothing. Just a stinky trunk. If I had rubbed it, I could have got the cats to sniff it. They'd... well... sniff it in their focused way.
Before leaving, I made a scrape for the resident robins and left some suet pellets. This is my version of the Native American tradition of leaving a gift of tobacco.
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