I have been in love with nature as long as I can remember. Nature photography, birdwatching, lichens, fossils, orchids, mountains, insects, everything else. Conservation, gardening at home, community gardening. I've loved it all.
Tan Ear fungus, Otidea alutacea, a ground-living member of the Pezizaceae (Ascomycetes). Unlike Peziza which forms a soft cup, Otidea has a vertical slit, making it more like an ear really. On soil below the big Oak tree behind the main pond in Gunnersbury Triangle.
Update: Glad to see there’s been quite a bit of interest in this page. Good news for you, then: on the 2021 Fungus Foray (photo), we all saw quite a few Tan Ears dotted about the western side of the reserve.
Each cup is no bigger than your little fingernail. The cups grow on damp compost which the workers in Kew Gardens heap thickly under the trees. The “eggs” are called Peridioles, and they’re basically little bags of spores; they are splashed out of the cups by rain and the spores can then germinate. The family is the Nidulariaceae, which surprisingly is part of the Agaricales (normal-looking Basidiomycete mushrooms). species is the Common Bird’s Nest, Crucibulum laeve. One of the cups is still developing and is covered by a membrane. Yep, a different Bird’s Nest Fungus with a larger, greyer, frilly cup. This seems to be the Field Bird’s Nest, Cyathus olla.
Mottled Birch Bolete, Leccinum variicolor, in Gunnersbury Triangle. The species is edible (if found in quantity!) but not nearly as good as the Orange Birch Bolete.
Psathyrella, a smallish toadstool with a fragile stem, a cousin of the Inkcaps (Coprinus)
Yes you spotted it, not a fungus. A Smooth Newt under a nearby refugium.
These seem to be young Agaricus, probably Wood Mushrooms, in the ivy and leaf-litter.
Well, EVERYBODY noticed this mushroom! Giant Funnel, Leucopaxillus giganteusAmethyst Deceiver, Laccaria amethystina, very different (alas!) from the delicious Wood Blewit which also has “blue legs”.
Three Stars! Geastrum triplex x 3 in Gunnersbury TriangleA different Geastrum in Alick Henrici’s hand, so we now have two species of the genus in the Triangle. It has only 2 layers, not the 3 (obviously) of G. triplex. It looks much like G. hygrometricum, the Barometer Earthstar, but there are at least 10 species so we’d best wait for Alick’s microscope examination of the spores.
Glorious Indian Summer weather – 26C – in late September was too good to miss, so I strolled around Wraysbury Lakes in shirtsleeves. I was rewarded with the sight of plenty of Common Blue butterflies (the females brown); Greater Spotted and Green Woodpeckers; Cormorants, Little Egrets, and a Hobby gracefully searching for late dragonflies (Migrant Hawker, Common Darter) in the fine warm weather.
Male (slender, on right, with protruding palps) approaches Female Sheetweb Spider (against green bramble leaf, with round abdomen) cautiously across her web. He wants to mate … but isn’t so keen on ending up as her lunch …
Wild Riverbank – Syon Park from Kew riverside. The whole area floods at spring tides, as all of the lower Thames once did before embankments were built. The wet meadow supports a rich mixture of herbaceous plants, with trees and bushes like Willow and Alder that don’t mind “getting their feet wet”.
