A wildlife diary
Mary Smith 33 Gaynes Park Road, Upminster, Essex, RM14 2HJ Tel: 0l708 228921
December started where November left off, with more rain and many fields turning into
shallow lakes and riverside paths impassable without high wellies. It was still mild, and
there were quite a number of fungi up that are more usually associated with September,
such as Parasol Mushroom and Fly Agaric. A visit to Thorndon Park was rewarded with
lots of fungi up under trees which had lost all their leaves and thus the fungi were in
sunshine, allowing some interesting photographic opportunities (see plates 1 and 2). At
the Exhibition and Social meeting on 7"' December Tony Boniface had fresh samples of
two wax-cap species, one from his own garden lawn picked that morning. Although
Wax-caps are usually considered as later species, this generally means late October or
early November, so even these were a whole month late. In the middle of the month we
had a cold snap with an East wind and most of the fungi eventually gave up.
About this time I woke in the night in bed with something wriggling or scratching near
the top of my leg. Fearing a nasty animal of some sort, and still half-asleep, I eventually
got it out and threw it out of bed. The next morning I had a bright pink patch about 2cm
across, where it had presumably bitten me. The next day I saw Del Smith, and I knew he
would have some ideas as to what sort of animal it was. He said to me 'Call yourself a
naturalist and you didn't even catch it and put it in a pot?' He went on to say that it was
almost certainly a smallish spider, and that they can nip if cornered. I never knew that
spiders in Britain could bite, and with such intensity that the mark lasted a week and
then peeled off in the way that a small skin burn eventually does. Obviously, the spider
had acidic juices in its bite, not just strong jaws. That is 2 lessons in one, learned the
hard way!
On Saturday 7"' December was the Exhibition and Social Meeting of the Club, which
was very well attended and enjoyed by all. There were some new displays such as
beekeepers with honey to sell, a display about the sea coming in through sea-wall breaches
at Abbotts Hall Farm from the Essex Wildlife Trust, a display on myxomycetes (slime
moulds) with a binocular microscope set up to study them, a display on dragonflies,
with lots of photos and more stunning pictures on lap-top computers, and many others.
I was particularly taken by a lovely set of photos illustrating plant galls, and I recognised
a large number of them. What really struck me about this set was the idea that any
abnormal feature on a plant is likely to be caused by a small invertebrate, rather than an
internal problem of the plant. Such features as in-rolled edges of Dog-rose leaflets, and
twisted bits on fronds of Bracken, are not a growth fault of the plant in question, but
have external causes in the form of a gall animal. There were some bracket fungi awaiting
identification, which Tony Boniface and Martin Gregory named. Three tiny beach shells
which I had brought along from a Brittany beach the previous summer were identified
for me by someone unknown as tusk shells, the old homes of a tiny worm-like mollusc.
2
Essex Field Club Newsletter No. 41, May 2003