Wrotham village

Several Fieldfare, Turdus pilaris, my first of the year in The Bull car park, and then again by The Rectory. Blue tits in the trees down St Mary's Road. Blackbirds there and also particularly at dusk along Kemsing Road.

Some lovely houses such as for example Wrotham Place by the East of St Mary's Road, and the old oasthouses at the start of Kemsing Road, Wealden Hall.

Lovely sunset from the hill first of all and later from the eastern side of the playing fields.

Hadlow village

Lovely sound of a Great Tit in song in the birch behind number 7 Maltings Close.

A sunny Leybourne

A nice view of a Goldcrest and a possible Chiff-chaff. A slightly tatty Jay, but good close-up views.

Fungi in the garden

I found three fruiting bodies of White Saddle, Helvella crispa, where there was a lot of leaf litter near the Norway Maple and the corner of the Beech hedge on the front lawn. This is I understand the commonest species of the saddles.

I was glad to see some very clear diagnostic features. The stem thickened upwards, a rather odd feature, and was creamy and stout with deep strong furrows running up the surface. The saddle was a deeper creamy brown, darker on the underside, with undulating lobes. as this fungus can be very common I have no reason to doubt its ID, although it is described in the Collins book as found in broadleaved and mixed woodlands.

A murky morning at Elmley - or five go mad on the marsh!

There was a very nice trip out to Elmley with the excellent Landscape Management group. Here are some photos from Stephen Langford, including this Northern Lapwing, Peewit or Green Plover, Vanellus vanellus. The lapwing names perhaps comes either from its erratic mode of flying, or from its tendency to drag a wing as it distracts predators from its nest.



These birds, like many others in their family, prefer to feed at night by moonlight, eating mainly insects.

Four students and I visited Elmley Marshes this morning. The themes included habitat creation, funding of nature conservation visitor facilities through visitor income, estuaries (internationally important numbers of winter duck), grazing marsh (rare breeding birds, important numbers of wintering ducks and waders), sea walls, brackish ditches (rare plants and associated insects), wader breeding requirements, impact of worming treatments, microhabitat creation by grazing activity.

We saw Wigeon, Teal, Greylags, Mallard, Curlew, Lapwing, Redshank, Black-tailed Godwits, Kestrel, Reed Buntings and a lovely male Stonechat. Also Starlings, Goldfinches, Chaffinches, Blackbirds, Crows.

It would be very tempting to go and stay in one of the Shepherd's Huts - but I wouldn't want to leave Monty for a night! I'll just have to get up early and make my own way there whenever I want to go, perhaps joining the Friends of Elmley" for a cheaper annual fee (I'll be generous with the donations though!

I was particularly interested in the predator gate - does the investment in this sort of protection a major factor in ensuring the breeding success this reserve is famous for? Its part of the new 8km fencing system installed 2012? to keep fox predation down, a system which this year seems to have resulted in excellent breeding results from birds like lapwings!

The monthly updates have been very informative, and helped to bring the picture to fruition.

Waterborne tree surgery at Leybourne Lakes

On the way out I came across what looked to me like half a dozen brackets of the Blushing Bracket, Daedolopsis confragosa, on a fallen Goat Willow log by the bank of the lake at TQ7058260442. Growing on willow certainly fits, it is supposed to be mainly saprophytic and to cause a white rot on willows in particular, and there was a good maze gill pattern on the underside, rather more developed than the descriptions suggested. Other trees it reputedly infects include birch, alder and beech.

The bracket is tough (I had great difficulty removing one from the trunk) and is described either as kidney-shaped or semi-circular. Other features included the rough surface in the middle of the upper side, the light brown zoning towards the outer parts of the upper side, with a thin contrasting whitish rim, at the relatively sharp edge. I didn't notice any purpling on the top surface when collected, but it was very much there.

Apparently the fruiting body has occasionally been used in ornamental paper making.

On the return towards the car park by the Ham Hill works, it seems that the tree surgeons (?) must have taken to the water to do their coppicing!

A little further along, there were two clumps of plants that could have been Japanese Knotweed, Fallopia japonica.

The Battle of Bossenden Wood

Bossenden Wood is a woodland area on the Western side of the Blean Woods complex around Canterbury. It is infamous as the site of the last pitched battles fought on English soil (albeit by small numbers of men on both sides).

In the battle Tom Courtenay (aka Sir William Courtenay) was killed with 8 or 9 others of his activists, together with two government soldiers (1 by "friendly" fire). Tom Courtenay had set himself up as a leader of a local revolt, attracting local fairly desperate malcontents deeply affected by the withdrawal of charitable payments, and the loss of farm-work due to the rapidly increasing mechanisation of farms, and the consequent threat of the workhouse for them and their families. There was no local charitable giving to support them, as the area was extra-parochial, with no church and no school for the children to go to. The judges were relatively lenient with the survivors, expressing a degree of sympathy for their grievous situation.

This is the Crooked Oak, a local landmark at Bossenden Wood. David Shire said that the name probably represents the summit of the hill where a succession of one or several oaks have got wind-damaged over many years. It seemed to be more like Quercus petraea than Quercus robur, purely from the apparently petiolate leaves.

In the picture above you can see the point where the large branch pictured below has been ripped from, apparently quite some considerable time ago.

The general vegetation around appears to be at least in part Sweet Chestnut, Castanea sativa, an Archeaophyte species, commonly  managed as coppice or "spring" (spring is sprung??), known in the Domesday book as "silvia minutia". Coppice may also be written coppy, coppis, coppse, copse, copy.

Along the old woodbank, this tree was considered to be a "stub" or "stubb" perhaps acting as a "cant" or "panel" marker according to David Shire, which it may well be, cut at about waist height. Alternative terms for the "panel" are "sale", "fell" or "barrow". However as far as I can see, with my very limited experience, from reading Rackham, it is just as likely to simply be a boundary marker. This tree is a Hornbeam, a very useful marker species, I could only take a wild guess as to how old it was:

This the same stub, from a different angle, noting some failure of regrowth, perhaps of an older coppice stool, perhaps indicating that the creation of the stub form of the tree came rather later:

The asexual stage of an Ascocoryne sp on a birch stump, possibly Ascocoryne sarcoides.

And here is some Candle-snuff fungus, Xylaria hypoxylon. in general it seems to be very variably branched. These individuals are quite dumpily rounded, but you also get stag's horn shapes or quite narrowly rounded tips. The bodies should release either white conidia (when you tap them?) or black ascospores:

There were very good numbers of fungi across the site, including these pretty dark flesh coloured mushrooms growing amongst the moss on this tree stump (pictures uncropped and cropped):

We also found these, which I think are Sulphur Tuft, Hypholoma fasciculare, or one of its relatives: