Fine fungi

After a bit of a slow start here, the crop of interesting autumn fungi is beginning to improve, no doubt because of recent rain. We found these three species in the Tyne valley near Wylam today. 

Variable oysterling Crepidotus variabilis, growing on dead gorse stem

Beech woodwort Hypoxylon fragiforme, looking very like Christmas baubles. Growing on a fallen tree trunk.

Purple jellydisc Ascocoryne sarcoides, looking like something that belongs on a butcher's slab. Growing on a fallen tree trunk.

Thursday's Guardian Country Diary is about this male common darter dragonfly - surely the last of the year - that we saw a few days ago on the banks of the river Tyne near Wylam. 

It settled amongst the fallen autumn leaves and seemed very reluctant to move away from the large patch of flowering ivy that still attracted flies that it was probably feeding on.

Since then we've had some hard frosts. It will be eight months before we see the next generation hatching out.

Harassment...

Yesterday, when we were walking along the river Tyne at Wylam, a cacophony overhead drew our attention to this gang of crows mobbing a buzzard. Birds of prey must get fed up with this constant harassment but this raptor had the situation well under control. It soared higher and higher in tight circles then, when the crows got too close, threw in a wide circle that left them cawing at each other in the centre, wondering where their victim had gone. 

Wonderful to watch - a masterclass.

Birch Brackets

I found two typical bracket fungi that live on silver birches this afternoon, on some trees on the banks of the river Tyne near Wylam. This is the aptly named hoof fungus Fomes fomentarius. We tend to think of toadstools as here-today-gone-tomorrow organisms that appear overnight, shed their spores over a day or two and then wither away but bracket fungi like these are perennial, adding a new layer of spore- producing tissue (the hymenium) every season until the tree that they are digesting has yielded up all its available nutrients. During their long lifetime the brackets can produce millions of spores. Each successive layer of spore-producing tissue is marked on the surface of the bracket by a ring-like indentation, rather like the annual rings of a tree but visible on the fungal outer surface. The hymenium on the underside of this specimen, formed from thousands of pores lined with spores, shows signs of damage - probably from a slug.

These two are old specimens, are probably moribund - their hyphae have exhausted the supply of nutrients they can extract from their host's wood, which by this stage has developed a crumbly texture akin to balsa wood.

 This is an old specimen of the most familiar bracket fungus growing on birch, the birch polypore Piptoporus betulinus, also known as the razor strop fungus on account of its past use for honing a keen edge on cut-throat razors. Young specimens tend to be cream-coloured but they go brown and become leathery as they age. 

Bracket fungi like these are hosts to a variety of different insects that breed inside their tissues, so this is a food chain where plant tissue is being converted into fungal tissue which in turn is being transformed into animal tissue. If you harvest one of these old bracket fungi at this time of year and keep it in a container covered in muslin (which I've just done) you can expect to see a variety of different beetles emerge in spring and early summer - and if they do I'll post pictures of them when they appear.