Glowing at find in dark woods

IT seems like only yesterday I was getting up at 4am to walk over to Stoke Park woods to listen to the dawn chorus – as I have done since I was a kid, full of springtime excitement, and now it’s getting dark by 6.30pm. What happened?

Anyway, one of the things I really enjoy about autumn is the fact that the trees are turning beautiful colours and it’s mushroom season. Sitting by a small, cosy camp fire somewhere, the smell of woodsmoke is probably the most relaxing thing I can think of. There is always an air of calm in a woodland in autumn. It is probably the most relaxing time of year in terms of things slowing down preparing for the long winter sleep ahead.

Here at Stoke Park, a place I have enjoyed spending time in all my life, one of the things I did this year was to walk through the woods in the dark of night, carrying an ultra-violet lamp with me. I like to wander around the woods and fields just looking for things that might glow in the dark. One particular evening I was walking through the woods shining my lamp around and I saw something glowing like a light blue light bulb. I stopped and had a look – I could not believe what I was seeing. It was a mushroom called Dryad’s saddle or the Pheasant’s back, glowing like something out of a movie – pictured above.

I have seen this mushroom in normal daylight and it was just a normal everyday mushroom, but under ultra violet light things changed a lot. My heart was pounding with childlike excitement and then I stumbled on another mushroom species also glowing like a light blub – called Sulphur tufts. These mushrooms are not bio-luminescent because there is only one species in the UK that can glow on its own without UV light and that’s the Jack O Lantern mushroom. These mushrooms are fluorescent – giving out stored light, rather than generating their own light. So why would they do that? The answer is because insects see in the ultra violet light spectrum (we do not) so as an insect is flying around they see this glowing light and land or walk all over it and therefore take more fungal spores away on their feet, a very clever strategy by the mushrooms.

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