It’s recognised by mycologists that West Wales (and parts of Scotland) are some of the world’s hotspots for grassland fungi, in particular the colourful range of waxcap fungi which typically fruit in late summer through autumn. In part because there are still pockets of “unimproved” permanent pasture that have escaped both ploughing and reseeding in recent decades. In part because of zero or minimal fertiliser or slurry applications to these fields: all such grassland management approaches rapidly destroy what were once widespread soil organisms. And in part because of the high rainfall and humidity of the region, which seems to favour both mosses and waxcaps.
I remember becoming excited when I first found just one or two ‘pink ballerina’ waxcap mushrooms (now Porpolomopsis calyptriformis, syn. Hygrocybe calyptriformis) scattered across our our upper hay meadow about 12 years ago. Then in 2019, I counted over 700 of these pink waxcaps in our steepest, east-facing field of about an acre.
This year there must be a few thousand of these mushrooms – I counted 390 in a single 70 yard walk across the field counting about 2 metres either side of my route.
These striking waxcaps are also now found in all but one of our 6 fields.
And many have emerged as clumps of 30 to 40 per group, with more still beginning to push through the grass even now.
This is how the excellent First Nature website describes them:
“One of the most beautiful of all the waxcap fungi, and now sadly quite rare in most of the countries where it is recorded, Porpolomopsis calyptriformis (until recently referred to more often by the synonym Hygrocybe calyptriformis) is found on cropped, unfertilised grassland. This waxcap appears in late summer and autumn.
These lovely waxcaps generally occur as solitary specimens or in very small and scattered groups. Occasionally they can be found in churchyards, but sheep-grazed upland commons on acidic soils are usually the best places to try.”
So it seems our steep field is now an extremely unusual hot spot for these fungi. The pink waxcaps are, of course, the occasionally visible fruiting bodies of an invisible fungal network which probably has profound effects on everything else that grows and exists in these fields: plants, invertebrates and bacteria.
We still understand very little about the role and interaction of soil fungi with everything else in a landscape, or indeed, a garden. However, since I last wrote in detail about them, in the link above in 2019, more progress has been made. Including the excellent insight into their impact in one closely studied ecosystem in this readable, open-access paper, from April 2020:
This discusses the significant and measurable changes in an area of permanent grassland in central Italy, as a result of the progression of the underground mycelial network of a single species of field mushroom, the Horse mushroom, Agaricus arvensis ( a Basidiomycota species). The study site is subject to periodic mowing for fodder production, and grazing is restricted in the autumn to a few wild populations of ungulates. As a species-rich hotspot, the habitat is subject to EU biodiversity conservation policy.
The annual fairy rings of mushrooms track the fungi’s underground spread across the pasture. From the paper’s summary:
- Our results showed a fungal-dependent shift in the community structure operated by a wave-like spread of fairy rings that decreased plant, fungal and bacterial diversity, indicating a detrimental effect of fairy rings on most species. The fairy rings induced successional processes in plants that enhanced the replacement of a community dominated by perennial plants with short-living and fast-growing plant species. In parallel, fungal and bacterial communities showed evident differences in species composition with several taxa associated within distinct sampling zone across the fairy rings. Notably, bacteria belonging to the Burkholderia genus and fungi of the genus Trichoderma increased in response to the advancing mycelium of A. arvensis.
- The profound changes in community composition and the overall increase in taxa diversity at ecosystemic scale suggest that fairy ring-forming fungi may act as ecosystem engineer species in Mediterranean grasslands. (sic bold)
It’s worth looking at this image, and accompanying text which illustrate the fungi’s wave like progression, and the visible impact on plant growth.
Sampling zones across fairy rings of Agaricus arvensis at the Rogedano study site. (b) Average relative abundance of A. arvensis in the fungal community across the fairy rings. Error bars indicate ± SD. (c) Transect across a fairy ring of A. arvensis and related sampling areas. The grey arrow shows the direction of fungal front movement.
The 3 colour charts below illustrate how the fungi’s advance has impacted species composition across the zones illustrated above showing the fairy ring progression over years.
Why I’m particularly interested by this, is that the fungal diversity in most of our fields seems to be progressing as the plant species and floral diversity also increases over time. And all as a result of the management changes we’ve introduced and recorded on these pages since we began our journey of discovery of traditional upland wildflower meadows in 2013.
Whilst the 2 hay meadows have our grazing sheep removed for many months of the year (January to August for the upper hay meadow and March to August for the lower hay meadow), at fungi fruiting time the sheep are rotationally grazed though all the fields. Typically being moved on after 2 or 3 days to new pasture – they prefer this, and it avoids the pasture becoming too close cropped at any point. 
However, this grazing can make assessing fungi a little challenging, since the hooves can quickly damage fragile mushrooms quite rapidly when the sheep enter a ‘new’ field. And if left grazing in any meadow for too many days in a row, it’s not easy to detect any changes in herbage length or colour from the advancing ring of a fungus.
So this year, after a few days with many more mushrooms emerging, I decided to whizz around all the fields and take some video clips to record what I found. Here’s my compilation YouTube:
And in doing this, I noticed something I’ve not seen before. We have some massive fairy ring type zones of more verdant grass, and mushrooms, where the fungus involved is the dreaded honey fungus, Armillaria mellea.
I’d written about this type of fairy ring, (in this post in 2021), where there was a clear ‘front’ of honey fungus mushrooms spreading out across our mossy croquet lawn. 
And obviously emanating from the large stump of a diseased and cut down ash tree, which we had to have removed several years previously as it began to fail, and drop large branches. (This year, the mushrooms have spread even further to the very edges of the croquet lawn). 
With our largest meadow honey fungus ring, there is no dead or dying tree, either at its centre, or even on the nearby banks/hedges. It’s a very large structure, with a roughly 186 yard (pace) circumference and slightly variable “diameter” between 38 and 47 yards. This year, however, there are many obvious smaller honey fungus rings, dotted around the middle of at least 4 of our fields. I failed to find any references to such honey fungus rings, apparently independent of woody material – just growing in pasture. Together with numerous examples of honey fungus bodies within the garden (and thus far) very few obvious tree or shrub fatalities, I conclude that this local phenotype is perhaps not as pathogenic as many variants can be. But maybe time will prove me wrong on this!
The world’s largest living organism by biomass, and possibly one of its oldest, is thought to be the Oregon honey fungus. Covering 3.5 square miles and weighing between an estimated 7,500 and 35,000 tons, it’s anything between 2,000 to 8,000 years old, and is thought to grow between 1 and 3 feet a year. Which could mean our large fairy ring is anything between 42 and 127 years old: (38+47) ÷2, = 42.5 × 3 = 127.5.
Might all our honey fungus colonies even all be the same clone? These days DNA assays could determine this. For a long time I thought that the oldest living organism at Gelli Uchaf was perhaps the oak behind the barn. A meadow ant colony in our lower wet hay meadow has certainly been here for longer than us (over 30 years), but maybe our own honey fungus colony might trump them all.
If you watch the video in this good summary of the Oregon fungus, you’ll see that some trees can coexist with it for many years before succumbing to it. Others seem to be completely resistant. And how important might it be at recycling nutrients into the wider ecosystem anyway? Or spreading available moisture around a garden or meadow during times of drought? Do all our winter and spring bulbs benefit from its presence in the garden? I suspect so, but will probably never know.
I think that since it’s certainly such a major features of our soil’s ecosystem there’s no point in worrying about it. It’ll outlast us, and as the Italian research demonstrates, it may well be playing an important (though largely unappreciated) role in helping to manage and modulate our field and garden ecology.
In the same field, cae efail, that is home to this larger fungal ring, there’s a smaller, but equally clear ring formed by a dark grey mushroom fungus. With more vigorous and darker green grass in the quite narrow fruiting zone.
Whilst researching honey fungus “fairy rings”, I came across several references to old Welsh folklore tales of the risks of stepping into a fairy, or faerie ring. 
And even a book published in 1888 by the then American consul to Wales, Wirt Sikes. Titled “British Goblins – Welsh Folklore, Fairy Mythology, Legends and Traditions”, at over 300 pages, I shan’t be finishing it any time soon, but it’s clearly a mine of stories long forgotten from these parts. Stories and myths told by people who observed what would have been much more common sights in their meadows, than is the case today. As part of the Project Gutenberg, it’s available as a free to access ebook, for anyone interested, by clicking here.
I should also record that I was able to remove the second super of honey from our most vigorous, insulated colony of honey bees on September 29th. As always, I opted to wait for a fairly still, dry day, several days away from a full moon, and placed a rhomboid plastic bee clearing board beneath the honey-filled ‘super’ around 3pm in the afternoon. Then returned to remove the ‘super’, and immediately afterwards, the bee clearing board, early the following morning. 
This year, finding a warm enough day was a challenge so late in the year. The afternoon temperature was about 15 degrees C, but the following morning, waiting for the sun to create a little more warmth by about 9.00am after a fairly cool clear night, meant the temperature would have only been about 9 degrees C. (Conventional wisdom would have it that this is far too cold to be opening up a hive). However, working quickly, and with no frames being removed, the temperature drop for a 2 box, well insulated colony would likely have been minimal.
The last element of removing the clearing board, is always the most likely to create a response from the bees, since many will be working at the top of the frames, tidying up the wax and honey mess created from twisting and removing the super box which has remained in place without any disturbance since April.
Since I never use smoke in any of my hive openings, this time I tried very quickly, and minimally spraying the bees on the tops of the exposed lower frames immediately after lifting off the bee clearing board, with a misting bottle containing lukewarm water, a teaspoon full of dissolved sugar, and a couple of drops of geraniol scent. My impression is that this resulted in far fewer bees taking off and flying around me. And with minimal aggression. There was also much less risk of bees getting trapped as the crown board was swiftly replaced onto the hive, since within seconds of misting, most exposed bees were tending to walk down deeper into the hive. I shall definitely use this protocol in the future.
There is an excellent lecture above, from last year’s National Honey Show programme, by Professor Martin Giurfa on “Honey bee pheromones: new discoveries and unsuspected roles”. He explores the large number of different chemical pheromones which honey bee colonies rely on for communication and task management. Several are related to plant based chemicals. If you watch the Q&A’s (which are always fascinating in these lectures), there is an interesting question and response about the use of smoke by most beekeepers when they open hives, and its potential longer term impact on bees, (from about 1.15.22 ). This gave me the idea of using this particular geraniol based mist spray alternative, which may indeed be a calming, scent based cue for the opened hive bees, at the time of maximal threat – to them and me!
This is the first year I’ve removed 2 full ‘supers’ from a single hive, but then it’s been an exceptionally benign weather year for our bees. The honey filled wax combs in this lower ‘super’, although created from scratch this season (as with the ‘super’ removed back in late August) are inevitably less pristine than the (earlier) removed full ‘super’. Simply since there will have been vastly more bee movements over these combs, and the cells towards the centre of the frames will also have been used for rearing brood, early in the year, as the colony expanded in size. And only later filled with honey as the colony numbers decline in late summer and autumn. Thus the honey is likely to taste quite different from these lower frames, and the wax itself will be a bit chewier, containing the silk cocoon of any reared bee larvae, which will have remained stuck to the inside of the wax cell walls: I never use any sort of queen excluder to limit the queen’s ability to move around the hive, and lay eggs where she wants.
__
Throughout early October, mainly on warm sunny days, I’ve noticed up to 3 dark brown hairy Fox moth, Macrothylacia rubi, caterpillars, basking on vegetation just outside our back door. A couple of days later it was obvious from piles of droppings that they were focused on consuming the leaves of a single clump of ribwort/lanceolate plantain, Plantago lanceolata. This is also one of the preferred plants which all our sheep will select out, grazing right down to the base of the leaf rosette.
As I discovered over 10 years ago, it’s known that this plant has anti-inflammatory pharmacological properties, and is also mineral rich, in part because of its deep tap root, as well as having over 20% protein content. Whether the sheep and caterpillars ‘know’ or sense this, or whether it just tastes better, I have no idea. But searching along the rest of the bank, I couldn’t find any other signs of plantain leaf predation by caterpillars.
They will overwinter as the larval form, then pupate next spring before the adult moths emerge around May/June. The excellent Durham moths website lists a wide range of larval foodplants for this moth, but doesn’t mention ribwort plantain, so perhaps our Welsh moths have different food preferences.
__
And so, to crows.
We see and occasionally hear Carrion crows (Corvus corone) most days around our smallholding. Usually singly or in pairs – they mate for life – and are often down in the meadows, or sitting on fence posts, or in the tops of trees. Watching, and waiting. Big black birds, on the look-out for their next meal, and checking out their territory. And very wary of people.
But only rarely seen and heard in big noisy gatherings, as I filmed here, in the top of a dying ash tree in our upper hay meadow. The noise alerted me to them early one morning. What was particularly odd was that just before the crows appeared, one of our ewes in the bottom field had started bleating. For no obvious reason. I was immediately worried she might have got into some sort of difficulty – noisy sheep always indicate some sort of problem, a completely quiet flock is the norm. We haven’t heard such ewe noise for many weeks, and she was only noisy on this particular morning – she hasn’t been since.
Were the 2 noisy events linked in some mysterious, and unknown to me, way? Or the full moon the following day? Or did they again, in some unfathomable mystery, sense that the slaughterman was due to arrive a day later to kill our 2 ram lambs? I’ll never know.
The use of ‘murder’ as a collective noun for a group of crows dates back to the 1400’s at least, where The Egerton Manuscript and The Book of St. Albans: Containing Treatises on Hawking, Hunting and Cote Armour, record many of the collective nouns still in use today for groups of animals and birds: a charm of goldfinches, a pride of lions, and a murder of crows. Crows would often have been seen around battlefields and graveyards, given their omnivorous diet and penchant for fallen stock.
I could only film these at a distance, but even so, the range of vocalisations, and body movements in a group like this, and obvious attention to something going on at ground level in an adjacent field, hint at something more sinister. What were they communicating?
We once watched a group descend on a weak or injured crow in our lower meadows and harry it mercilessly, until we attempted to get closer to them, and they all flew off.
About a week later I was trying to get close enough to photograph a red kite, sitting on a branch near to its nest site in the copse beyond the stream, when a single corvid – probably a crow, and not a rook, flew in and relentlessly tried to hassle the kite from its rest place branch. 
Which eventually responded a couple of times from its branch perch, with a stretch of its wings. Before clearly giving up on the chance of a peaceful rest, spreading its huge wings, and effortlessly gliding away from its tormentor.
__
As always in recent posts, I try to include a little music, which anyone can see and hear has, over the years, spanned quite an eclectic mix of genres.
Thus, I should mention an unusual experience I had after our trip to Cardigan for the very first performance of ‘Saturo’, by Catrin Finch (the renowned Welsh harpist who we’ve heard solo several times live, and in collaboration with other artists,) but this time performing with ‘sound engineer’ Lee House. A wonderful pre-concert fish and chips sunset was enjoyed, as above, watching thousands of gulls in their rush hour journey back to Cardigan Island over the Teifi estuary and Poppit Sands, which preluded our trip to Theatr Mwldan.
Here’s how the concert was billed on the Mwldan website. (I’d copied their promotional text below, before the relevant webpage was removed from Mwldan. Though promotional information is still available currently from the artists’ own site here).
“A Mwldan Production (with backing from Arts Council Wales – sic.)
music . mind . sound . emotion
Step into a realm where sound becomes sensation, and music dares to ask the questions words cannot. This immersive experience fuses experimental harp, electronically manipulated textures, and spoken word into a guided journey through the depths of perception and emotion. You won’t be told what to feel or think—but you will be invited to feel everything, to think in new dimensions. Each moment is crafted to draw you deeper into mystery, dissolving boundaries between sound, self, and silence in a carefully constructed unravelling. What you’ll find at the end cannot be promised—only that you won’t be the same.” (Bold -sic!)
And I’d also read this piece online as background before booking the tickets, aware that the performance might be unconventional, but feeling that it’s always a good idea to have our boundaries of experience stretched:
“In recent years, House and Finch have explored the intersection of music, healing, and human consciousness.
Their journey began in 2021 with a commission for the National Eisteddfod, where they began exploring the use of binaural beats, sound waves, and musical entrainment—the powerful phenomenon of the body syncing with rhythm—to induce states of calm and presence.” (bold -sic.)
The set looked atmospheric and intriguing, as we took our seats.
The two performers arrived on set, to an audience of roughly 100, and Catrin gave a brief introductory talk explaining that the event would last for about 90 minutes, that there would be no interval, and that we were welcome to get up and move around should we wish. She added that there might be some who found it wasn’t “their cup of tea”.
Then a reel to reel tape deck was operated by Catrin for some recorded words by Lee, and off we went.
But only after both performers had donned large headphones (see here)…
I could discuss this at length, but let’s just say that for the first time in my life I felt physically ill as a result of sound, and very nearly walked out after about 30 minutes. A very odd, unfamiliar sensation of disquiet – literally! But difficult to pin down in words exactly how I was affected. The volume and low frequency sounds felt like they were penetrating my very being in a deeply worrying way. Indeed my brain’s neurones, if not the rest of my body, probably were resonating in a very unnatural way to some of the loud volume low frequencies. I managed to make it to the end, just. (Fiona hadn’t been as badly affected though had resorted to covering her ears several times.) We were certainly both relieved to escape the venue at the end, and into quieter night air.
Was this what was intended? Or am I particularly sensitive to such sounds, living where we do, and accustomed to the quieter life we choose to adopt? I have no idea. I did provide feedback to the venue, in their routine post concert questionnaire, suggesting that (as, say, with strobe lighting) some form of mild ‘health warning’ should, perhaps, be considered for future performances. Or that volumes and frequencies used by the performers could be reassessed, and monitored. It took 36 hours for me to feel that my body had fully recovered. For the strange ‘disquiet’ to pass. For me to feel ‘normal’.
I have searched online a few times for any post Saturo concert reviews/comments and drawn a blank, other than a link above to Catrin’s Instagram feed, although the 3 night, different venue tour has now finished. More concerts are apparently planned in 2026, which is partly why I’m writing this personal review. Perhaps I didn’t look for other upbeat reviews in the right places? I’ll say no more.
“What you’ll find at the end cannot be promised—only that you won’t be the same.”
Indeed.
Though to demonstrate that I’m still exploring new (and old) music, do watch and listen to the music and performance given below by Daniil Trifonov, of the slow movement of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Sonata (No. 2) in C-Sharp Minor, Op. 80: II. Andante.
You might not enjoy the music but it does demonstrate how complex music with a huge dynamic range can, through melody and performance, captivate, enlighten and inspire, when played with such emotion and involvement. This sonata was composed in 1865, Tchaikovsky’s last year as a student at the St Petersburg Conservatory. The sonata in its original form wasn’t published until after his death, in 1900.
It’s included on a very recently released double CD of (mainly) early Tchaikovsky piano works, which I can thoroughly recommend. All unfamiliar (to me) though enjoyable works, played beautifully and very well recorded. And including a stunning performance of a transcription of one of Tchaikovsky’s more famous famous ballets. “Suite from Sleeping Beauty”. The music below is the penultimate movement, the Adagio. Which rises from soft, quiet beginnings to symphonic piano drama before falling away again to end on a single, fading, low register pedal held resonant note.
I’m inclined to agree with this review comment –
“These are five of the most wonderful minutes of recorded piano music. Thank you, Daniil!”
This arrangement was composed in 1978 by Mikhail Pletnev, who was only 21 years old at the time. Pletnev won the International Tchaikovsky Competition in the same year he composed this. As did Trifonov 33 years later in 2011