I spent a couple of soggy hours in Dunrobin's soggy woods this morning looking for fungi and this was all I found, an equally soggy bouquet of very tired puffballs, except....
....on checking the path that passes this standing stone where, last year, we found half-a-dozen scarlet elf cups, they....
....were there again, but only these two. They were 'flowering' in the perfect elf cup environment, on a bed of moss covering a branch of very rotten wood. There must be....
....thousands of places in these woods which offer this environment but don't host scarlet elf cups, and then one stumbles upon a site....
....in which they thrive. This is a picture today of the 'original' elf cup site where, a couple of weeks ago - see post
here - we found the highest concentration of this fungus ever. Today there were even more, some of them....
....crowded together on a favoured branch. At a guess, there were upward of 80 fruiting bodies in an area of perhaps four square metres, a....
....glorious little garden burning brightly in the incessant rain.
I spent a couple of soggy hours in Dunrobin's soggy woods this morning looking for fungi and this was all I found, an equally soggy bouquet of very tired puffballs, except....
I'm thinking of an interesting experiment. Take a single Scarlet Elf Cup fruiting body and place it in a similar woodland habitat that presently has no fungi growing. Place it spore side down on a favourable moss-covered branch to alow the spores to enter the wood structure. Maybe next year, there will be signs of another community.
ReplyDeleteWorth a try, Derryck. The woods certainly need some cheering up - I can't remember so few fungi in previous years.
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