Last weekend I had the luxury of four days off work, and stubbornly determined as ever to make the most of November (rather than wish it away as most of the advertising at this time of year seems to want to me to do), it seemed like a good decision to spend the last few days before the second lockdown gallivanting through the various patches of forest surrounding Norwich. There are few things in life better than packing a book and a flask and finding yourself a quiet corner of the woods to read in, pausing every now and then to breathe in the smell of the soil humus and feel the autumn sunshine on your face. But I digress, because what I want to talk about in this post are some rude looking creatures which I’ve been trying to find for ages.
The wet weather at the beginning of October has meant its been a good year for fungi, but despite my best efforts I hadn’t seen much more than turkeytails up until now. Determined to change that, I set off into the russety undergrowth of Mousehold Heath, and came across something new. That rather phallic looking fungus in the photos below is a stinkhorn, and they’re delightfully weird and fully on brand Halloween-y which was just right for this time of year.
First of all, they really do stink – they’re supposed to smell like rotting flesh but I described it to someone as more like a strong cheese that’s past its sell by date. The smell of course attracts flies, which hone in on a sticky black substance called gleba (you can just about see the remnants on in the grooves in some of the pictures) that initially coats the tip and which apparently tastes sweet to them. This contains the spores which they then disperse. For added weirdness the phallus emerges from an ‘egg’ which means the whole thing looks like, well, the result of a work inappropriate google. The woodland trust informs me that its name in 1597 was ‘prike mushroom’, which seems about right. After a while of getting your nose in, you can even start to smell them before you spot them.
A brand new species for me, and one that made me giggle. Nature continues to be weirder than anything my imagination can conjure.
N.B. I started pulling the photos together for this post on Wednesday evening as a way to stop myself from constantly refreshing the electoral map. So much of this year (and much about the last four years) has been focused on just enduring. I know that there’s still so much work to do, but this lightness, this hope, feel like very precious things indeed. Happy Sunday.
