Autumn is with us again, although the hot weather at the start of September made it feel more like an Indian Summer. With all the rain earlier on, there was a particularly bountiful crop of berries. Blackberries clustered thickly, and oaks and beech in full sun glistened with acorns and beechnuts. As for sloes I suspect we will be drinking sloe gin well into the new year. I noticed an early flush of fungi in August after rain, but relatively little since. On the wooded rim of Membury ring I spotted a fine crop of Death Caps, famously the world’s most poisonous mushroom – yet harmless enough so long as you don’t eat (or pick) them! Interestingly some had been nibbled, perhaps by slugs and snails, and who knows whether they lived or died! Growing with the Death Caps was a pretty orange toadstool called Geranium Brittlegill, Russula fellea, though to my nose it smells more like stewed apples. An interesting find on the football pitch was a colourful orange-and-yellow toadstool called Hygrocybe intermedia, the Fibrous Waxcap, so-called because it has a waxy texture, like a candle. This is not a common species, though, maybe if it can grow on a football pitch, it should be!
The sounds of early autumn were also with us – the bark of Roe Deer across the valley, the autumn song of the robin, and the buzz of wasps as, finally free from their labours in the nest, are thirsting for sweet things. They are swarming on the first ivy flowers, along with those wasp look-alikes, ivy bees and hoverflies. There are reports of some big hoverflies, migrants and mimics of wasps and hornets. They cannot sting and are quite harmless. How do you tell the difference? Simple. Wasps have four wings, flies have two. Wasps have jaws, flies a sort of fleshy suction tube. As for the yellow-and-black-striped ivy bees, spot the bright-yellow pollen sacks on their legs, and their kindly bee faces, unlike the robotic mask of a wasp. Butterflies were still about in the second week in September. Brimstones and Peacocks will be going into hibernation as the weather gets colder. Some of the Red Admirals will migrate south, along with the swallows, but the last to emerge from their chrysalids will probably go into semi-hibernation. The same is true of some of the moths you see on flowering ivy if you shine will be a red-filtered torch on them - red, because moth eyes can’t see it; instead they can see ultra-violet, which we can’t.
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