Gossamer

With the forecast once again for mist and fog we decided that perhaps the best walk to do was to join in the celebration of all things dank by heading for the darkest and densest woodland in search of fungi - which turned out to be extremely disappointing as the Backies plantations, usually the home of the most varied fungal collection, had very few to show us, although these few...

....did include the first fly agaric of the year, much chewed over by slugs and snails.

However, the lack of fungi was more than made up for by a spectacular display of gossamer which particularly coated the branches of gorse, broom and pine in the clearings where the dew had been able to form.

We searched in vain for the spiders which had created this strange wonderland but found none until we realised that....

....there were two types of gossamer, the much more common denser clumps - seen at the top of this picture - and the more 'standard', but less prolific web-like structures.

We searched in vain for spiders in the amorphous clumps but in the....

....web-like structures we found their owners, a small, brown spider species which was tame enough to allow a very close approach for a picture.

Which leaves open the question of who builds the amorphous gossamer. Is it a different spider or is it the same spider as creates the web and, if it's the latter, why does the spider go to such huge lengths to build the gossamer masses?

A Giant Fungus

"Mist and then fog" the forecast promised for this morning so, when we walked through the woods on our way down to the village for a paper we were on the lookout for the group that most favours those sort of damp, dreary conditions - the fungi. However, what we stumbled across just off this path to the left in the picture was....

....one of the largest fungi groupings we've ever found. That it was in such beautiful condition, and the fact that Mrs MW had passed this way on Wednesday and not seen it, suggested it had only just appeared.

Of course the fun in all these discoveries is in the identification. This picture proves it is one of the gills but, beyond that, I'm stuck, despite spending some considerable time 'surfing' the internet for large, brown gill fungi. But then, as I keep telling myself, it's not the artifice of human classification that matters, it's the wonder of finding something which, in its own way, is beautiful.

A Chill September Walk

On a day when the still-air temperature of 14C felt more like ten in the easterly breeze the only butterfly spotted on the wing during today's walk was this red admiral. It was intent on feeding, but not on the coppery-coloured dead-heads of the bog asphodel which was crowding a small pond in the marshland above the plantations. No - the flower whose nectar-rich blooms it preferred above those of several other wildflowers, including the three heathers, a flower which is hidden under its extended wings, was devil's-bit scabious.

Back in the forestry the rowans show signs of having failed to agree on how harsh a winter we are to expect: some were loaded with berries, others had hardly any.

Above the Trees

If we walk far enough up the forestry track which passes our house we can escape from the pine plantations onto the open moor which, did we have the energy, would have allowed us to climb Silver Rock and given us fine views down onto Loch Fleet. As it is, it's a pleasure to be out into a very different habitat, one which encourages....

....the least-familiar species of the three heathers, cross-leaved heath, as well as....

....devil's-bit scabious. There's also something very special about this bleak and wind-swept environment, a sense of freedom, of escape from the pressures of our human world into land which very few people care to visit.

We were up there on Saturday, in exceptionally sunny weather which had brought out....

....a small copper, one of several of these delicate and locally not-so-common little butterflies we've seen this year.

Swallows

I don't like it when the swallows start perching on vantage points like the telegraph lines and the tops of the builders' scaffolding. It means they're feeling a change in the air - cooler, longer nights, a heavy dew across the fields at dawn, glistening spiders' webs blanketing the gorse bushes.

The summer of 2024, with such warmth as it has brought, is ending. Autumn is at the door and, here in the north, the cold will come soon. The swallows, along with the martins and swifts, have a different season to find, either the summer season of the southern hemisphere, if they go that far south, or the equinoctial regime of equatorial lands.

As a small boy in Kenya I used to see the swallows in the months either side of the new year. This is the season of the Kaskazi, the NE trade wind, which includes a hot, dry season between December and March. So, later, between the ages of nine and sixteen, while I spent the winter at school in England, the swallows were enjoying Kenya's warmth.

I'd see them again when they arrived in England in the spring, knowing that this was a signal that I would soon be tracing their tracks south to spend the eight weeks of my summer holiday on the glorious Kenya coast.

Now, each year when they leave, I wonder whether I will see them again in the spring.

Memory Flashes

We spent the last night at the end of our 2009 trip to Namibia at a small lodge close to the airport. It was probably the least impressive of the places we'd stayed yet, for reasons unknown, it's been flashing back into my memory over the last few days. I'm reminded of the walk we took on the last afternoon, one during which I took photographs of the African bush, to remind me of its colours, its heat, of the battering shriek of the crickets....

....and of its wildlife - though there was nothing more impressive than the ant hills built by those energetic creatures during the excavations for their nests.

In the late afternoon we sat in the lodge's hide, overlooking a waterhole whose one reward for our patience was a black-backed jackal. However, we were treated to....

....a wonderful farewell African sunset.

The Namibian holiday was our first, very tentative return to Africa following our retreat from Rhodesia in 1970. It made us determined to go back again, which we did in subsequent years, each time to Tanzania. Those holidays provided us with hundreds of photographs which, with time on my hands, I now enjoy going through.

But the memory flashes are different, for with them I am, for a few moments, immersed. I not only see a scene, I hear its sounds, I feel its heat: it is real and, yes, I wish I was back there living that time again.

Fungi

Last autumn, for some reason, the fungi didn't perform very well. This year they're doing rather better, be it on the links where, in amongst the tall autumn grasses, we have plenty of....

....blackening waxcaps which, if one follows them through life, go from yellow to orange to red to brown to black. There is also an impressive display of....

....puffballs, this one almost perfectly mimicking a golf ball though many are bigger than a tennis ball. Also scattered around are....

....their exploded remains.

In the pine plantations the brittlegills are appearing, some the size of a saucer.

I rather dread each fungal season. I keep telling myself it really doesn't matter whether I identify these fungi or not, yet I feel it's untidy to have taken the trouble to photograph them if I'm not then going to make some effort to identify them.