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Review of the Wildlife of Epping Forest 1999 - March 2000
JEREMY DAGLEY
Forest Ecologist, Corporation of London, The Warren, Loughton, LG10 4RW
Fungi
The event of the year was the fall of a giant. Back in 1994 I came across a huge Artist's Bracket
(Ganoderma adspersum) growing from the side of an old shattered Beech snag at Jack's Hill. The
stump was decaying fast and was no more than about 3 metres high. Attached to it was this enormous
fruiting body, which at the time measured some 66cm in width, so large in fact that it made a shelter
from the drizzle (see Plate/fig xx). Ganoderma grows in a way that creates knobbly annual rings
across the top surface of the fruiting body so one can estimate its age. In 1994 this specimen was at
least 7-8 years old. I have returned regularly to see this mycological monster but in December 1999
in the hope of taking photos of my children underneath it (to complete the set!) I discovered that it
had fallen off with the final collapse of the Beech stump. I returned later to pick it up and you should
have seen the reaction of the the elderly couple in the car park as I staggered back with my treasure!
It measured 77cm across and about 77cm deep, a further 11 cm of growth in 6 years and well beyond
the normal range quoted in fungi identification books (eg Phillips 1981). The 13+ year old fruiting
body is now inside an Owen Emergence trap in the hope of revealing its hidden invertebrate resi-
dents. With the March sunshine a few Diptera have already appealed and this wonderful "fruit"
should provide more interest for a few years yet. In the meantime, the fungus still lives on, with
younger fruit bodies still appearing on the remains of the stump.
Talking of size they estimate that some of the largest organisms on earth may turn out to be fungi
with their huge underground networks of mycelia. One candidate must be the saprophyte Collybia
butyracea (Butter-cap), the fruiting bodies of which were in profusion this autumn on the Beech
leaves across much of Epping Forest. Another fungus that seems to be having its year is Ustulina
deusta which in March 2000 is showing its velvet grey fruits in large quantities on many Forest
Beeches. This may be a rather ominous sign as many regard this as a highly pathogenic organism.
The problem of mushroom-picking was highlighted again this year with the Forest keepers coming
across several people with car-boot loads of fungi, clearly for commercial gain. More distressing
was the sight of hundreds of fruiting bodies simply knocked over, presumably by mushroom-pickers
searching for edible species. This could be very damaging to the fungi, although nobody knows, but
it is certainly a problem for the scattered and ephemeral populations of fungus-feeding insects. The
dynamics of these mycctophagous insect communities arc little understood and they still regularly
produce species new to science, as discovered in the Forest in 1998 (see the 1998 Forest report in
Essex Naturalist no. 16).
One casualty of this approach was a freshly-emerged, beautiful, bronze-flecked Prince mushroom
(Agaricus augustus), which I had returned especially to photograph. It demonstrated to me the clear
difference in attitudes towards beautiful flowers. Can we transform peoples' attitudes in the same
way that we have become educated not to pick masses of wild flowers?
Finally, the find of the year was made by Peter James on one of his excellent fungus forays. He came
across Creolophus cirrhatus about 3.5 metres up in a large Beech near the Field Centre at High
Essex Naturalist (New Series) 17 (2000)