In the relatively mild days and nights in early November there was still plenty of insect life about. One morning I found several little moths sitting on my car. The wavy white line on their narrow wings told me they were Diamond-back moths, one no larger than a fingernail which has somehow spread all over the world, and in some places has become a significant pest of cabbages. If you see a pale, flappy moth in the lights, there’s a good chance it’s the suitably-named November Moth (though it also flies in October!). They used to think that these mottled pale-grey moths flying late in the year had anti-freeze in their make-up. In fact, their secret seems to be low body weight compared with relatively large wings. Moths normally need to warm up to fly, usually by vibrating their wings. This one doesn’t bother. Because it doesn’t need to beat its wings so fast, its muscles don’t need to warm up so much. And it can flap about in the winter cold and dark without using up much energy. So simple, but it seems to work. This, and the Winter Moth, which flies in December, are so common that their caterpillars form an important food for nesting tits, especially Great Tit, come the spring.
The trees were at last putting on their autumn tints by early November. The great oaks bordering our quiet lanes were turning a lovely coppery colour, while some of the beeches, having already covered the ground with a layer of ripe mast, were golden-yellow and others a plummy red. The field maples seem almost to shine, a pure sunshine-yellow. As for the Liquidamber tree in my neighbour’s garden, it glows in the sun like an Olympic torch.
So long as the mild, wet weather continued there were plenty of fungi around, especially those that grow on dead and rotting wood and roots. In Savernake we saw spectacular numbers of honey fungus and sulphurtuft, both of which sprout in large clusters on stumps. Honey fungus has a bad reputation as a tree-killer in gardens and orchards, and there are no known chemical controls either. In the wild, though, it provides what one could regard as a useful, even necessary, function, rotting down old stumps and other useless dead wood. Why is it called honey fungus? Some say it’s due to the yellow-brown colour of the caps, but I experimentally ate one once and found it strangely sweet.
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