CNHS Granchester Meadows

 The Cambridge Natural History Society surveyed the plants etc in Grantchester Meadows in 2006 and 2016 so this year is time to repeat the survey. We met on Sunday afternoon at the Cambridge end. The first two meadows are known as the Lamppost Meadows as each has a lamp-post at its centre from 1920-1940 when the meadows used to be flooded with water pumped from the Cam and used for skating. There is an attendant’s hut at the corner of the first field, where the fee of six pence for an evening’s skating was collected. It is managed in a traditional manner - once the meadow has dried out there may be a summer hay cut and it is grazed until the end of the year.  No fertilizer or herbicide has been used. The public path alongside these meadows emerges into open meadows stretching to Grantchester, owned by King’s College. The CNHS group were identifying and recording all the plants species including grasses and sedges while I concentrated on the invertebrates, lichens, galls etc. Here a few plus possible IDs sheet. I was intrigued by the spore cups of he nettle Rust, Puccinia urticata, 

Bourn Walk

 As I needed to go to the Surgery in Bourn this morning and it wasn't raining, I walked over via the edge of the golf course where there is a well-established Hawthorn hedge which yielded quite a few clumps of Fungi, a couple of Slime moulds and several vibrant lichen species. There was a lot of water in the Bourn Brook but fortunately no flooding on the walk. 

Toft Wood Lichens

 There are some projects that I regret deciding to pursue and I think Lichen ID might be added to the list!! The differences between species or even genera in some cases is very small visually and so a complete classification of a localities lichens would have to involve a chemical testing! At the moment, I am resisting this and just doing tentative IDs having photographed them for their sheer beauty in colours and shapes!! These are from our 30-year old community wood in Toft. The first 3 images are from raw files sharpened and denoised with RawPrime3 and stacked in Zerene stacker while the others are jpegs from the Olympus camera's in-camera stacking. Again to shoot them all in raw, sharpen and denoise and then stack would be very time consuming. Lots of decisions!!

Extending Paxton Lichen/Fungi List

An enjoyable walk round Heronry trail at Paxton yesterday in the sunshine spending some time in the scrubland near the Quarry photographing a few more lichens and fungi. The most interesting find for me was this bright pink lichenocolous fungus - Illosporiopsis christiansenii parasitic on Physcia tenella and sometimes also on Xanthoria parietina. It grows in and on the host lichen, feeding from it, degrading it, and eventually killing it. You can see in the second image bottom right the areas or sick or dead lichen of both species. I will add the ID sheet when completed.

Toft Churchyard Lichens

Today's post definitely a preliminary look at what is growing on the walls and gravestones in our village church. They were very difficult to photograph handheld in not very good light. I will try again with some type of lighting to get sharper images for ID, The summary image at the end shows the IDs that various apps suggested - further shoots and comparisons of images should confirm or not these first attempts and then to check with other sources.