We have spent the day on a coach travelling down to St Ives in Cornwall for a short break and left in beautiful autumn sunshine which made even the M5 services look attractive. As we entered Devon, the clouds have gathered and soon rain came. We tried a walk after dinner but proved too heavy even for me! We may be visiting quite a lot of indoor attractions in the next 3 days. (Taken with an old pocket-sized Sony RX100 converted to Infrared)
Paxton Pits has areas of wet woodland where mosses, lichens and, at this time of year, am interesting mix of small fungi can be found.
On Saturday at Brandon, I used a UV light on a variety of toadstools and must research what causes the consistent different colours that are emitted under this light source. At Santon Downham was well as finding a wide range of new species, we tried using a smoke machine and a crystal ball with some of the toadstools growing on the abundant branches and in the pine cones. I photographed what I thought was a small beetle and it turned out to be a sheep tick while the white '?gall' from Saturday is a Sputnick Spider's egg sac.
The weather and some lost car keys were the only things that detracted from a perfect day at Brandon yesterday - there were abundant fungi of lots of species, many very colourful, to keep our group of a dozen photographers very happy on their knees for the day. The overcast conditions meant that burn out of the whites and unwanted shadows were not a problem but the low light levels gave a bit of a problem spotting species under the leaf canopy.
