Autumn

 It's definitely looking autumnal now, with the leaves falling and changing colour. I was raking up some leaves in the garden when I spotted a hedgehog.  He/she was  munching on something  so I went to get my phone for a photo.  Hedgehogs always give an impression of being cute, but when I looked at what was being eaten it was a dead field mouse... 

I don't expect to see a hedgehog during the day and my garden is rabbit proofed so when he tried to climb up the netting to move on, I picked him up (carefully, with gloves on,  as those prickles are sharp) and put him in some unfenced woodland.

While walking along the Main Street in Newtonmore, I stopped to look at the lawn in front of the Monarch Apartments (once the Craig Mhor Hotel) which has an extensive crop of fungi growing on it. My favourites have to be the ink caps (Coprinus species) which start off as fat fingers poking up through the soil.

Then they self destruct into drippy black caps.

The caps release an enzyme that dissolves the cell walls in the cap and gills but leaves the stem standing. Presumably the spores manage to escape before they are destroyed. There is more about inkcaps (and how to make ink) in a previous post here.

Garden fungi and an interesting app

The recent wet weather might not be ideal for walking but it is encouraging lots of fungi to pop up in my lawn.  I am not a fungi expert at all and can only recognise a few obvious ones. This beautiful Fly Agaric (Amanita muscaria) appeared in the lawn.

Tuesday (left) and Wednesday (right)

It started off as a globe and is now like an umbrella - which is appropriate as the second photo was taken in the rain today. This is the archetypal fairy toadstool that has hallucinogenic properties.

A second toadstool appeared nearby. Just a nondescript brown one. I have no pictures of it in situ as my husband picked it to try out a new app he had installed on his phone. I am not a big fan of ID apps but I was impressed with this one which used the phone camera to look at the specimen from different angles until it had enough data to arrive at an ID.  Here are some pictures:

The app came up with the name Peppery Bolete (Boletus piperatus).  Being a suspicious sort I looked it up in a book to check if it fitted and I think it does.  It is a bolete because the underside has pores instead of gills. The stem  becomes yellow at the base (easier to see in real life than in the photo). It's associated with Birch trees and often grows close to Fly Agaric so the habitat is correct. The final test is to check the colour of the spores, which should be olive-brown.  To do this, you take off the stalk and put the cap on a piece of paper with a glass over it (so no draughts) and leave overnight.

The result is a perfect replica of the underside of the mushroom.  The spores are supposed to be olive-brown, but I think brown is close enough, given the other features.

The name of the app is Seek by iNaturalist and it is the same program for both iOS (Apple) and Android phones (the rest!).  You can read more about it here.  It identifies in real time so will use up your data if you are out of range of a wifi connection. It even managed to identify some lichens correctly!