Wild This Week (Friday 19 Sept)

A scamper in freshly fallen leaves, and a mysterious chicken.

Whoops, this is too long to fit in an email! Open it in the app if you’d like to read to the end.

This week, we’re crunching through the leaf litter in a small deciduous woodland. There’s a marked change in the air now, with ‘cold’ being the presumed default temperature when waking in the morning.

Dried skeletons of faded flowers line the footpaths.

At the very edge of this small ancient woodland, the wild wind carries leaves and insects haphazardly along the hedge line. A glut of fallen crab apples is starting to rot, pleasantly souring the air. Wasps whizz past my head, only semi in control of their direction of travel.

Moving into the woods, the tree-line offers protection from the howling, chilling, drying wind. It’s much darker in here, but also warmer and damper. A range of new sounds can be heard: creaking old trees, crunching leaves and the alarm calls of a flock of assorted tits.

The dark woodland is carpeted with crunchy yellow, orange and brown leaves. Ivy lines the footpaths.

There’s the Blue Tit’s sharp ‘peep peep!’ and the Great Tit’s growly chatter, all with a backdrop of high-pitched tweeting from the Long-Tailed Tits.

Mostly, these birds remain hidden by the leaves that the trees are still clinging onto. Every now and then, one breaks cover to take advantage of a particularly tempting food source.

An old photo of a Long-Tailed Tit eyeing up hawthorn berries.

Sometimes, you catch an out-of-place Spring or Summer call, like the Chiffchaff’s signature song. Perhaps it’s a youngster, practicing? Or an adult declaring its territory for the winter.

I encountered an extremely strange sound in the woods this week – it sounded like a sad, slow chicken, but it was at the top of a very tall beech tree. I’d never heard anything like it, and with migration underway there’s always a chance something really odd will show up!

The beech tree is laden with masts and leaves, though both readily fall on you as the squirrels run about overhead.

I paced around the bottom of the tree and cursed its thick canopy of leaves as the sad chicken mocked me with further cries. Then, a small distance away, the distinct drumming of a Great Spotted Woodpecker started up.

And the chicken answered it! Or rather, mimicked it – not by drumming, but with a throaty call that sounded remarkably similar.

At this point I felt sure I’d never find out what was making the noise, although the mimickry pointed towards some sort of corvid. As I stepped back from under the tree, ready to give up… there it was. A large, black bird perched on the top of the tree.

My mysterious misery-chicken! A Carrion Crow.

Not the Crow in the story - this one was instead imitating a Raven, with its fluffed out trousers and thick throat feathers!

They’re weird, they’re clever and they’re SO charming. And they stick with us throughout winter, so hopefully I’ll get to know this one a bit better over the coming weeks.

As you may know from my many frenzied Notes, I broke my beloved camera. But I dug out my old Pixel 6, which has a far superior camera to my current phone. It’s not good enough for birds or mammals, but it captured an array of smaller (yet equally stunning) ancient woodland inhabitants. There is so much to see!

There are… Hornets, gathering pollen from the ivy.

Snails, balancing precariously on leaves after a downpour.

Mushrooms and toadstools pushing their caps above the leaf litter, or pouring out of dead wood.

A grey-capped toadstool (that I won’t attempt to identify) poked its way out of the very wettest part of the forest floor.

Dryad’s Saddle (probably) catching a shard of sunlight.

A Ganoderma bracket fungus, dusting a spider web with ‘cocoa’ dust. (Definitely do not eat).

Magical moss covers everything from waist-height downwards.

Ivy climbs and covers everything that the moss does not.

All manner of creatures are drawn to the Ivy, which produces an abundance of pollen long after the summer flowers have all faded.

A Speckled Wood butterfly at rest under the hedgerow.

A Green Shield Bug, blending in to the background.

Even old, dead trees that have seemingly nothing left to give are riddled with life – microbes, fungi and invertebrates slowly break down what’s left.

It’s a profound moment, seeing a 100-year old trunk turned back into dust. Dust that will nurture the saplings that will support the forest ecosystem for the next century to come.

On the left, the hardened roots show the size that this trunk was when it fell. The pile of dust is all that remains of the rest of this old body.

Thank you for joining me on my wander, I hope you enjoyed it even without the usual range of birds! I was surprised how much I loved hunting for these little scenes with just an old phone to capture them.

Jasper was proud to find this (disused) Badger sett. I often wonder what he’d make of badgers (and what they’d make of his badger-face markings!). What did you see, while I was scampering in the woodland with Jasper this week?!

Gem