Knole Park, Dec 2014

Pond in Knole Park, 6 December 2014

I led a walk in Knole Park on 6 December.  We had just had our first really frosty night, and in the nearby woods the leaf litter was frozen solid, so it didn't seem a good day to go looking for fungi there, but the bright sunshine was lovely and the park itself was very pretty.  And as it happened, we found quite a few fungi in the grass.  It's a good season for waxcaps, brightly coloured red and yellow fungi that love the short grass, though actually we found several species in dark woodland a week or so earlier.

Hygrocybe chlorophana, Golden Waxcap.   Knole Park, 4 December 2014.

I took a couple of waxcap photos when I reconnoitred for the walk a couple of days earlier. That was a miserable grey drizzly day, so I was very pleased that the sun shone for the actual walk.  Several waxcaps have greasy or slimy caps, as you can see by the way this one glistens, and this Golden Waxcap has a slippery stipe as well.

Hygrocybe coccinea, Scarlet Waxcap.   Knole Park, 4 December 2014.

When young, these Scarlet Waxcaps are as bright as berries in the mossy grass. The cap is slippery, the stipe is not.

I also found this next item in the grass.  I had read that the droppings of Green Woodpeckers looked like cigarette ash.  We had just seen one of the birds zooming along just above the ground, and this was not far away.  It is certainly not as pretty as the waxcaps, but just as interesting to a naturalist.

Dropping of a Green Woodpecker, Picus viridis.  Knole Park, 6 December 2014.

My last photo for the day is the Bird House folly, currently occupied by a park worker.  It was

built in about 1761 to house Lionel, first Duke of Dorset's exotic bird collection.  

Bird House Folly, Knole Park, 6 December 2014

This is a view through its front gate.  The flint walls are said to be medieval, and brought here from nearby Otford.  So I suspect that the stones were brought here and then rebuilt into wall shapes. 

Our thoughts on seeing this was that it would be very dark inside, and lacking in storage space.  That might not have worried the birds, but it would be hard on the estate worker.

[The two waxcaps were taken with my EOS 6D and 100mm macro lens.  The other photos were taken with my iPhone 6; the saturated colours make the pool shot look very punchy but the depth of field and dynamic range are not really good enough for the bird dropping.]