Jewels

We look out for these each year and they come in the same fairly small part of the enclosure. There are other waxcaps but these are the special ones.

I have seen a Ballerina near here; not, so far, this year. Others are common and will be found on many bits of unimproved grassland, even on my own lawn. One of these is the yellow Meadow Waxcap. Another waxcap is the Blackening Waxcap. This could be the final phase of one though there is another that also turns very black.

These pretty fungi go some slight way to compensating us for the utter dreariness of the appearance of this livestock-chewed-over grass during all of the year. Those who claim that grazing is necessary to produce the fungi are indulging in our now commonly recognized scam of conservation grazing justification. The sheep crap does nothing for the fungi which is reliant on roots of the plant life, mainly grass - a mycorrhizal association. Another conservation misconception. As for short grass being necessary rather than long, well how short does it need to be and for what period of time? The red waxcaps are mainly in one small area that could easily be cut by hand a month or so before their appearance in October by anyone worried that they might not be easily seen.

Now we know the way the conservation industry works, hand in glove with farming and grouse moor owners we are wary of listening to people who tell us that biodiversity is dependent on a system of farm style management - as if it was not industrial farming practices that caused the decline of so many species in the last century.