Getting down and dirty with the 'shrooms

In the course of clearing the jungle like vegetation which threatens to swamp my perimeter fence, I found this large hole in the fence. No wonder my naughty cats have been seen going walkabout! I would be none the wiser if not for my English neighbour who has said he saw three cats including a ginger one in their garden, and also when he was working for another neighbour he even found Harry shut in an outbuilding when he went in there to do something!

But far more worring is what on earth kind of animal made this hole. It wasn’t the cats trying to get out, that’s for sure. This fence is pretty tough and something would have had to gnaw through the wire and then push it back like this into this perfect circle. We have racked our brains trying to think what it could have been. A coypu (aka swamprat or ragondin) have the rat like teeth to do so, but the hole is miles bigger than they need to get in; in any case we haven’t seen any here for about 9 months. And the hole is much bigger than a fox would need. Bit worrying really! But it’s now blocked off and we will keep an eye on it.

A rather worrying hole!

So onto the fungi. I had spotted a bunch of tiny fungi that had appeared a couple of days ago and thought I’d have yet another bash at trying to capture them. I have friends who will probably look at this post who love their fungi and take loads of great pics of them, but I don’t seem to find anything interesting in my garden and what I do find is always low down. So on with the waterproof trousers so I could kneel down, sit down and lie down in the mud!

I was lucky that this midgey thing landed on this fungi just as I was looking through the viewfinder, as any bug makes a shroom shot a lot more interesting to me!

Thanks little midgey thing!

I had to use flash for most of my photos as unfortunately a dull January afternoon in a woodland setting means very little light.

It's almost impossible to get down to ground level with tiny fungi!

Showing how small they are.

Dear Bertie (there's always a cat in the way when I'm shooting things these days)
at least serves a purpose to give you an idea of how tiny these fungi are!

I found a couple more on a rotting log that’s in our wildlife pile, but most of the original wood stacked there about nine years ago is now rather covered in brambles, leaves, branches and the like and I can’t really see the original logs placed there. Other logs and dead stumps that have been in the woodland since we moved here never seem to have any fungi growing out of them. Only moss! 

The only fungi I found growing out of a rotting log in our wildlife pile.

The last fungi shot is Turkey Tails which are looking past their best, but a midge was wandering around over it and again, that was more interesting to me!

Turkey Tail fungus with a different kind of midge - note the fluffy antennae.
You'll need to click on the picture to view it full size.

The following collage shows the sort of thing one sees in a winter garden. A lot of the green in the woodland area comes from moss and ivy!

Top is a Sycamore seed germinating.
Lichen that's fallen from a tree attached to a dead twig.
Rotting log covered in moss and ivy (but no fungi!).

I’ll finish this post with a bit of moss. The first is my lovely granite trough that we discovered years after moving here - it was upside down under a shrub and we just thought it was a large rock until a bunch of strong guys turned it over for me and I was over the moon when I saw what it was!

My granite trough covered with moss.

Mossy jungle - think these 'flowers' are called Sporophytes.

I would try to learn more about moss, but if you've ever looked at the Wikipedia entry, you need a degree in science/botany to understand it. Even worse if you look at the page about Sporophytes! Go on, have a look. 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sporophyte 

I have more pics from the garden including a few flowers so I'll do another post in a few days.