A beech mast autumn

 

It seems to be a beech ‘mast year’ locally. The ground underneath seed-laden trees is crunchy underfoot, with a thick layer of fallen empty husks. The beech nuts, favourite food of grey squirrels and field mice, tend to disappear quickly but in a mast year there are sometimes enough left to feed flocks of winter migrant bramblings, my favourite finches.

Twice, during the 50 years that we’ve lived in the North Pennines, we’ve encountered flocks of several hundred bramblings feeding on the ground under the beeches in Stanhope Dene, a steep-sided ravine planted with beeches in the late Victorian and Edwardian eras.

When the beech mast finally runs out, or if it’s a hard winter with snow on the ground (rare, these days), these chunky little finches visit our garden bird feeding station in January and February, and by the end of winter they develop this rather lovely caramel and black plumage.

Ophion, a dastardly Darwin wasp

 This dastardly Darwin wasp, with antennae curled like Salvador Dali’s moustache, is an ichneumon wasp, an Ophion species that parasitises moth caterpillars.

It looks like it might be Ophion obscuratus, the cream-striped Darwin wasp, often active as darkness falls and strongly attracted to lit windows at dusk, so that’s probably how it arrived in our living room recently - through an open window on a mild autumn evening, as dusk falls ever-earlier.

The genus is named after Ophion, a serpent-king who, in ancient Greek mythology, ruled the cosmos from Mount Olympus.

Toadlet foraging down amongst mosses and dead autumn leaves

 Spot the tiny toadlet! 

Let's hope that its cryptic colour protects it from hungry predators.

My sharp-eyed eldest son spotted this tiny amphibian down amongst the moss and dead leaves when he was walking in the Derwent Walk Country Park near Gateshead this morning, and sent me these pictures. 

It's one of my life's great pleasures that all my children grew up sharing my delight at such close encounters in nature.