My local nature reserve used to be a Victorian rubbish dump, but now it is full of wildlife. And if you look closely on old logs on a mild, damp day you will probably see some wonders: fungi.
I went to visit last week. The brightly coloured leaves were painted across the forest floor and the droplets of water on some of the berries were like diamonds. In the winter and autumn, fungi are very common. At first I didn’t see many, but the deeper we went into the woodland the more we saw. They were all hard to identify, but we managed it using a couple of nature books and Shroomify, an app that identifies mushrooms.
Here are a few of them: veiled poisonpie, shiny from the rain; smoky polypore, with a yellow underneath and a black circle with a white ring around it; and honey mushroom, with golden-cream caps. One of the fungi, with a brown flaky cap, we weren’t sure about, maybe it was dusky puffball or shaggy scalycap. Later I found out that veiled poisonpie can be poisonous, but people in Mexico eat it a lot; I also found out that some species of honey mushroom glow in the dark (this is called bioluminescence). And my grandma thinks they’re a nuisance in the garden.
With fungi, sometimes you are just looking at an old, wet tree stump, and then you realise there is something growing out of it. Some fungi can have bright colours, whereas others can be dull. But I think all fungi are beautiful.
Jasper, eight
Read today’s other YCD, by Julia, 14: ‘I’ve been keeping my eye on the foxes’
The Young Country Diary submission form is still open for autumn articles, closing at 10pm on Sunday 2 November
