Fungus foray to Bradwell-on-Sea on October 22 2008
Graham Smith 48 The Meads, Ingatestone CM4 OAE
Four members met at Curry Farm at 10.30am, a slightly disappointing turn out but this was
an experimental venue at a site situated at the north-eastern tip of the Dengie peninsular
and which could aptly be described as the "middle of nowhere"! Curry Farm is a private
nature reserve that was created by the late Bob Dewick and his son Steve on former sand
and gravel workings. Steve and another EFC member, Richard Gerussi, met us on arrival
and kindly gave us a guided tour of the reserve. It supports a range of habitats including a
belt of secondary woodland and a Scots Pine plantation, which shelter the reserve from the
prairie farmland to the east; rank, wet grassland and scrub along the banks of the Bradwell
Brook to the south; large areas of open, flower rich grassland - part planted, part natural;
and a few small, sallow lined former gravel workings. Like many sites on acidic sandy
soils Ragwort has become a perennial problem. It is a great plant for insects but can be
highly invasive and Steve reckoned that he had pulled up around a quarter of a million of
them in the past few years! There are still plenty left for the Cinnabar moths though. Moths,
of course, are the reserve's main claim to fame. Bob Dewick began trapping here in the
mid-1940s and Steve continues this work, which means that there is over sixty years of
continuous data from this site. They have even had a moth named after them and a very
attractive one at that, namely, Dewick's Plusia. Steve, though, reported that 2008 had been
one of the worst years on record, especially for migrant moths, even the converted war
time pill box, with a 400 watt mercury vapour bulb on top, failing to catch a single migrant
worthy of note in October, often the best month for such captures.
Thousands of native trees have been planted on the reserve during the past few decades
and these have now reached adolescence. My reason for suggesting a visit to the reserve
was the hope that these would already support a micorrhizal population of fungi. However,
it was with some trepidation that I led this foray as previous forays, elsewhere in Essex,
had resulted in very few of the larger agarics such as Russula, Boletus and Lactarius and
at times it had been a bit of a struggle to find sufficient species to maintain interest. As
it turned out, Curry Farm proved to be around par for the course this season and, hopefully,
those members that attended were not too disappointed. We recorded around forty-five
relatively common species but there were no Boleti, only three Russula - betularum,
fragilis and nobilis (a beech associate), and two Lactarius - plumbeus and pubescens,
both micorrhizal with birch. Cortinarius are a notoriously difficult group - the stuff of
legend in mycological circles - but betuletorum and hemitrichus are two of the easier
species to identify. Both grow under birch at Fryerning Churchyard and so I was readily
able pick them out on this foray. Other species of note included Pholiota aurivella,
growing on an oak stump - a species that I had found for the first time a few days
previously during a foray to Blakes Wood, Danbury - and Hebeloma pusillum, a small
species with a contrasting dark brown and pale tan cap, which grows in damp areas
under sallow. Also Mycena pura. I was foraying for several years before I first found
this species; now it seems to turn up on every foray I attend, in sites all over Essex.
Essex Field Club Newsletter No. 58, January 2009
23