Tony Hardware's Fungi Finds: Hawkes Wood, Nr Wadebridge

Tuesday, 8 January 2019

Hawkes Wood, Nr Wadebridge - 4th January 2019

Time to seek out what has been growing in my local patch and so I visited Hawkes Wood, a Cornwall Wildlife Trust site near to where I live once again. I have pulled together a database of all species my colleagues that I have accompanied or found myself have found in this delightful woodland. This presently stands at 64 species, not bad for a fairly small site, some of which were firsts' for Cornwall and one today made it into a top ten listing for the UK! I started by checking out my favourite wood chip pile close to the entrance of the reserve and wasn't disappointed again, not only were Stropharia aurantiaca (Redlead Roundhead) still in full bloom (this is January!) and spread liberally around the site but I noticed some small new mushrooms appearing from within the wood chip on the ground. These turned out to be Tubaria furfuracea (Scurfy Twiglet), new for me, and unusual as normally found inside woodland on woody litter, but were obviously happy here finding a deliciously rotting wood chip, even if in a farmer's field. The highlight of the day turned up in the NE corner of the site on a rotting oak log on the ground where I noticed protruding extensions coming out of the log at 90 degs. After careful examination with a few specimens at home and help from keys of Xylaria by Peter Fournier, I was able to identify the tiny fruiting bodies as Xylaria cinera. This has been recorded in Cornwall before but more or less only here, as there are very few other recorded findings elsewhere in the UK. Another special species for this fungi rich county. Lastly, I found a unusual looking respuinate which had cobweb features and margins of rhizomorphs. Checking afterwards at home the spore detail produced exceedingly small subsph. spores and along with the fact that this was growing on moss on oak and other keys pointed towards another first for Cornwall in Trechispora cohaerens.