This is the season for fungi - from now until their peak in October. This year we seem to have had a surfeit of earth balls, a rather yellowy sort of puff ball which is very common in the wood. One I hadn't seen before was the blusher toadstool which shows a reddish tinge on the top. Thank goodness that the old country people devised lots of names like that to save us amateurs the necessity to talk or write about them using their Latin names. Better a blusher than Amanita rubesens!

But what a wealth of other names for fungi I have seen in the wood from time to time - fly agaric, shaggy ink cap, oyster fungus and stinkhorn. The latter really does stink, but it's difficult to find.

Similarly, another sort of wild life has attracted many imaginative names - moths. I was reminded of this when Doug found a caterpillar of the elephant hawkmoth. So named, it has a snout which retracts when disturbed, and gets quite menacing: weaving from side to side against an enemy. This one was almost black compared with the elegant and beautiful bronzey-green and pink of the adult moth. A browse through my insect book throws out lots of moth names at random: swallow prominent, black arches, wood tiger, feathered footman, common quaker... on and on they go!

The more I have become involved in the wood the more I would like to be able to spend a lot more time in it just looking, rather than working. So I, and probably the rest of the team can only recognise and understand a small part of the wild life there, which ranges from ferns, flowers and finches to rowans, reptiles and rabbits.

And with that flight of fancy it is back to work again, currently in the trees, now turning to the autumn paintbrush colours of red and brown.

If you visit the reserve, don't forget to leave nothing behind you but your footprints...

John Hall © 2001