Recycling rulers bring new life from dead wood
I CAN often be found thrashing around in long grass in the lanes and fields around our village.
The majority of the time I am seeking the dog’s ball, as he chomps on grass knowing full well where his toy is lying.
When he is ready he will come out of a bush carrying the ball, some yards away from there I am searching.
Of course, being a naturalist, most of my neighbours believe I am searching for some rare plant or animal.
Sometimes they are correct in their assessment.
Over the coming weeks I have made it my task to seek out dead and rotting wood, so I can look for one of our common fungi, which appear to be tiny stags’ horns.
The candlesnuff fungus looks brilliant, it has a stick-like or forked fruiting body, which is brilliant white, but its body is black.
This is quite striking on the rotting wood and leaves on a wood floor, but the candlesnuff is only tiny and may only grow to six centimetres tall.
It is a sticky-uppy fungus so it is also known as a stag’s horn.
It grows in groups, making it easier to spot and appears on stumps and branches of all sorts of trees.
This is the kingdom of the fungi and they get their nutrients and energy from organic matter, rather than photosynthesis like plants.
What we tend to see are the fruiting bodies or mushrooms, arising from an unseen network of tiny filaments called ‘hyphae’.
These fruiting bodies produce spores for reproduction, although fungi can also reproduce asexually by fragmentation.
The candlesnuff fungus relies on dead wood, but the importance of this habitat for wildlife is often overlooked: to keep a place tidy, mature and ageing trees may be removed and fallen dead wood cleared away.
That’s not good for fungus, or other plants.
Keeping dead wood in your garden, helps to encourage all kinds of fungi to grow, in turn, attracting the wildlife that depends upon it.
I have a couple of old logs and they are surrounded by fungi as we speak.
I have no idea whether it is something I can make into a mushroom stroganoff.
Fungus is great, being a cure for diseases and a cause of diseases and some may be poisonous to animals and humans.
They can certainly give you a tummy upset if you eat the wrong one, so be careful.
Fungi are also great for the environment.
They work hard to decompose dead organic matter, making the Wildlife Trusts’ woodland management work a little easier.
That recycling of organic matter provides nutrients for plants and trees and it releases nitrogen.
Some of the fungus you are seeing now may have been around for decades, just waiting for the right conditions to come out.
So, if you see me looking through the leaves and dead wood of the forest, please don’t judge me too harshly.