Wintergreen

Various usnea lichens

String-of-sausages lichen

Jew's ear (or jelly ear) fungus with frost

In the depths of January, on those days when there’s so little light from the sky, my eye goes seeking out brightness in other places.  It’s a turgid, murky day, the kind the locals call ‘dimpsey.’  But there is colour everywhere if you look carefully enough.

When there’s the merest hint of winter sunshine, blackthorns, a deep burnt burgundy a shade away from black, reveal the origin of their name.  When the grey hand of clouds slides over, flattening the light, these thorns appear truly black.  Dead bracken stems glow a ferrous shade of orange, especially on the gloomiest day. 

The unfortunately named jew’s ear fungus that grows on dead or dying elders changes texture depending on the amount of rainfall, altering with a little sunlight from a slobbery mess to a taut umbrella with the depthless velvety sheen of mid-denier tights.  It’s one of the few fungi that will tolerate sub-zero temperatures without turning to mush; this morning several of its ears were fringed with frost.

These purples, oranges and browns are pleasing to the eye, but mostly mine seeks green.  ‘Wintergreen’ is an evocative term that traditionally meant what we now call ‘evergreen’ – pine, holly, ivy.  Those trees, retaining their chlorophyll year-round in glossy, hardy envelopes, are dependable in their umbrous shades of dark green. 

What is more satisfying is the other, more subtle greens that surprise the eye and appear to glow: the damp rubbery discs of pennywort; ferns, crisp and brittle but still verdant.  The cool, moist, springy banks of emerald tamarisk moss in which you can hide a hand.  Patches of forest star moss like verdant islands in a granite-grey sea, their fruiting bodies extending like drooping brown palms.  All of them performing that magical transmutation of sunlight into energy, even when the former seems nothing more than a memory.

The strangest hues of green are provided by lichens.  Winter is when they come into their own, revealed by the lack of leaves on the trees.  They seem to glow in poor light, like the luminous green stickers of childhood, and the low sky picks out their presence like the cave of dark under a bunk bed.  Map lichen, a lurid yellowish green layer spread thinly on the granite, looks like a child’s version of islands, coloured in with a day-glo marker and edged with black fine-liner. 

The bare branches of deciduous trees are bearded with string-of-sausages lichen and encrustations of related species like twigs of coral in the soupy light.  The coral comparison is apt, because like corals, lichens are the product of a symbiotic relationship between different guilds of life.  In the case of lichens, it’s between an alga and a fungus.  The fungus provides structure and the plant cells enable the lichen to photosynthesise – hence the uncanny glaucous shades.

Usnea articulata or string-of-sausages is my favourite.  It’s a scarce bushy lichen that’s highly characteristic of Dartmoor.  It’s largely confined to the south west of England, with a few sites in Wales.  It’s only found in humid climates with clean air and abundant rain.  The thalli (the stem-like parts that give the lichen its shape) are long and tubular, and pinched in at the joins like old fashioned butchers’ sausages.  Articulated - hence the scientific name. 

Beyond these, the strands narrow to a blur of fine tendrils that tangle one into another and ensnare raindrops.  If allowed to grow undisturbed, they hang long and loose in dangling tufts that billow in the wind and sometimes tug down branches in a gale.  Every part of the organism is an unvarying pale grey-green.  Against blue sky it’s delightful, and against a more typical Dartmoor murk positively eldritch, especially when viewed through twisted oaks among tumbling moss-covered boulders.

Once, when exploring some ruined farm buildings with my children in early spring, a mistle thrush slipped quietly away from a sycamore that was draped in cascades of string-of-sausages lichen.  We climbed onto a wall to inspect the branch the bird had flown from, and, parting the curtains, found another world.  An immaculate nest containing four pale blue eggs speckled with brown, screened on all sides by drifts of glacial green lichen.  It felt like voyeurism, and we left as quickly as we could.

Down By The River

Life must be tough for a pond skater on a Dartmoor river in winter.  I’m crouching down next to the peaty flow of a watercourse that’s been up and down like my mood, pushing its way through the valley, lapping at its brim by night, leaving a line of stranded dead rushes and detritus by day.  I’m watching two pond skaters wavering back and forth across the calmer, glassy current at the edge of the river, just above the stepping stones, where those chunks of cloven granite bunch up the water ahead of them, slow it up a little, depending on the flow. 

This is an important spot for me.  I love to be by the river, and even better to be standing in the middle of it, invigorated by the rushing, the gurgling, surrounded by amber bubbles and scudding water that carries my eye with it down the valley.  When I retrieve my gaze and cast it back upstream, the curve of water endlessly drags it back past me and around the bend.  But in winter it’s not often that I can get across.  Even when uncovered, the stepping stones are grey and treacherous, so often covered by rising water at this time of year that they retain a slimy film of incipient algae that, with luck, will dry by summer when the river finally drops.  They show the marks of the traditional feather and tare method by which they were split by hand with hammers and iron spikes long ago.  Three quarters of the way across the river there is one stone that has tilted, presenting a narrow peak for the warily reaching foot to tread on.  I’ve seen an old man fall in here, and labour to right himself, clothes weighed down with water, embarrassed, refusing my help.

The pond skaters are keeping away from the middle of the river, where the flow is strongest, and who can blame them?  The tiny hairs on their highly adapted feet not only prevent them from plunging through the meniscus into a fatal underwater world, but they also enable these curious insects to judge the strength of the current and avoid being swept downstream.  These two are doddering back and forth, sweeping the shallows, literally treading water.  Their two hind pairs of legs cross-brace the surface like someone spread-eagling to avoid falling through ice.  The front pair is bunched up by the beak-like mouth parts, ready to reach out and snatch.  It’s hard to see what these little predators are feeding on in the depths of winter.  Being mainly scavengers of stricken insects that have fallen into the water, they must struggle when there are few insects on the wing.  With that and the hugely variable flow of the river, the sudden nocturnal floods, they must hardly rest.  Why are they out and about anyway?  Aren’t they meant to be hibernating?  Perhaps the milder temperature of the last day or two has been enough to revive them and send them out onto the river.

I’m just leaning further over the water to get a closer look when my Jack Russell, who has been watching the pond skaters with interest, jabs her snout forward and swallows one of them.  Its struggles are over.  I manage to call her off the other one and remain long enough to note how this little brown insect continues to slide across the clear margin of a larger turbulence that it must sense as a surging peril to be avoided at all costs.  It pings heedlessly back and forth over a patch of submerged sand that seems to glow, despite the murk of the January day.  So like a fragment of vegetation itself, beneath its feet shreds of dead brown grass and rush revolve and pulse in the current.

January thrushes

Mid January belongs to the thrushes.  The light has started tilting back in life's favour and we have had a couple of warmer days.  Song thrushes have started singing in the last day or two.  It started with a distant piping coming from up the valley, and now other resident males are starting to crank their emphatic, repetitive notes, pushing them up through the murk, the mist, the sideways rain and the wind like crocus shoots through loosening soil.  They sound like they're reaching, or re-asserting, or building something.  It's a glorious sound.

From the end of summer, our song thrushes seemed to disappear.  Late summer moult is a quiet time for songbirds, and we expect them to lay low.  But our song thrushes just seemed to vanish.  I didn't see one from August to the end of October.  They were here alright, but out of sight - tucked away feeding, keeping safe in the base of the blackthorn thickets.  Now they're scooting out from hedges and patches of bramble as before, issuing that chuckling, nutty, hazel-brown alarm call.  They know something's up.  I don't know what they call it, this widening of the light, but we call it - recklessly, prematurely - spring.

Wafts of fieldfares and redwings are still combing the hedgerows, and the mistle thrushes started singing a week or more ago, casting those wild notes on the air from the highest trees in the valley.  Eight or nine blackbirds, some of them surely winter visitors from perhaps as far away as the Baltic, have regularly been feeding together in the far field.  There have been blackbirds everywhere this winter.  When the winter visitors are starting to leave, and some time around late February or March the resident males unfurl their beautiful fluid song: that will be a moment to celebrate.

Some recent photos

Not a wizard with staff conjuring water, but my son Gus making water spout from a burst pipe (original purpose unknown).  It's currently making the ground shake near Week Ford.   A strange sensation!

The trails of leaf miner insects on bramble leaves.

Hound Tor (left) and Honeybag Tor (right), viewed from the Jay's Grave to Natsworthy path.

The sun rising over Combestone Tor.

Roosting Goosanders at Venford Reservoir, prior to their morning departure.  A drake Goldeneye was also present - the first I have seen here.

Another rainbow over Chagford.

Starling murmuration at Ham Wall

Earlier in the month I, along with MA Travel & Nature Writing course leader Stephen Moss, course tutors and fellow students, visited Ham Wall RSPB reserve on the Somerset Levels to watch the famous starling roost.  We were treated to perhaps half a million birds streaming in, bunching, meshing and billowing, making a clear late afternoon sky appear grainy, before draining down into a distant area of reeds as though someone had pulled a celestial plug.  The 'iron filings' image is very apt.  It was said to be the best show the birds had put on there this winter.  What was almost as interesting was the crowd of more than fifty people that gathered with us to watch, including a very small girl watching enthusiastically from her mother's shoulders.

Looking west towards the Polden Hills from Ham Wall.

A walk in Lustleigh Cleave

Lustleigh Cleave, a wooded valley on the eastern edge of Dartmoor, is a fascinating area.  I've been meaning to take Jane there for a while, and two weeks ago, during the cold snap, we got round to it.  We started in Manaton and walked an anti-clockwise loop via the Cleave, Foxworthy, Neadon Cleave, Horsham and Water.  Then back to the Rugglestone Inn (best pub on Dartmoor, recently nominated for the Countryfile Magazine awards for the best country pub of the year).  Highly recommended.

An interesting large canker on an oak tree.  

A clearing in Lustleigh Cleave.  This photo doesn't quite capture it, but to me there are few winter sights better than purple birch twigs against a blue sky.

A holly  sitting on a granite boulder, ivy
 tendrils seeming to bind tree to rock.

The first snowdrops of the year

An engraved stone sign on the edge of a fascinating property (grass roofs, stone pillars, lake) near Water.

Dartmoor light

The changeable weather of the last few weeks (months, years?) has created some interesting light effects.  We've had fog, mist, sunshine, racing clouds, frost, rainbows, snow, rain, sleet, hail and more rainbows, more rain.  These photos were taken near the Warren House Inn a couple of weeks ago.  I promise I was not driving while taking the first one!

Water Hill, from the slopes of Birch Tor

Hoar frost

One morning a couple of weeks ago I went out looking for feather frost (see previous posts), and then went on a gentle walk to take in the sunrise, which in this deep valley surrounded by hills doesn't occur til nearly nine o'clock in early January.  There had been a hard frost, and gates, fences and vegetation were covered in exquisite hoar, like tiny glinting blades.  As a natural spectacle, a fleeting enhancement of a landscape, it's hard to beat.

On a fence rail

On bramble leaves

On gorse

On lichen and a signpost

The White in the Woods

The white patches have appeared in the woods again.  They only come on these sorts of nights – the clear, still, punishingly cold ones, when the stars glint.  Looming out of the dark, in the corner of your eye, they look like rubbish – like plastic bags strewn across the woodland floor among last year’s beech leaves.  It is an incongruous sight: the glaring whiteness punctuating the black before dawn.  But although it appears amongst the leaf litter, this phenomenon is anything but man-made trash.  A closer look reveals something that’s natural and almost unbelievably beautiful.  It’s feather frost.

Exquisite, iridescent filaments of ice, sparkling in the torchlight, each an individual strand.  They have sprouted in incredible profusion from twigs and branches that lie on the ground, splaying out like the finest hair, like Father Christmas’ beard, like the fake silky mane of a child’s toy horse.  On longer twigs these tendrils of ice often surge out laterally, then curve down from a central parting, an effect that increases the resemblance to human hair.  The soft, slow explosion of ice splits the dead bark, which peels back to make way for this remarkable winter bloom.  If you pick up one of these twigs without due care, or run a finger down it, the strands of ice coalesce and fall away, revealing clean yellow wood and surprisingly clear-cut ends that look like they have been trimmed with scissors.  Doing this feels like sacrilege, and I generally try not to dislodge the fronds of ice but leave them intact, to melt in their own time.  Sometimes I will pick up a frost-flowered twig and bring it indoors to show my children, who are used to that sort of thing.

From stubby twigs or chunks of wood, ones that were especially replete with water, come the most spectacular flowers of frost.  These are the ones that splay out in all directions, making a coiffured confection of delicate ice.  Sometimes gravity, and perhaps the gentlest breath of wind, swirls them into candyfloss curlicues that resemble nothing else in the natural world.  On the very best specimens, it’s impossible to see the wood whence all this unbelievable ice has emanated.  A ridiculous pompom of teased and twizzled whiteness nestles in the crunchy leaves like a formless creature from a vintage psychedelic children’s programme.

Feather frost is an attractive name, and the one I prefer for that reason, but the pedant in me has here overlooked the fact that it doesn’t resemble feathers and is not really frost.  Technically frost derives from water vapour that originates in the air, then freezes on contact with objects.  This phenomenon results from water inside sodden wood that freezes in a certain way, in the right conditions.  The phenomenon is also known as ‘frost flowers’, ‘hair ice’, ‘ice wool’ or ‘frost beard’ and doesn’t seem to be especially well known or well documented.  It’s fairly unusual, but probably not as rare as we might think.  Many people I have spoken to have never seen or even heard of it, which is a shame, as it’s a treasure to marvel at, a piece of pointless joy in an increasingly utilitarian world.  I want to spread the word.

The place where I live is the only one where I have ever seen feather frost, though it undoubtedly occurs elsewhere.  This spot is suitable because it receives high rainfall, is relatively sheltered and situated in a valley bottom close to a river, where the air is humid.  It also is one of the last parts of the valley to receive the morning sun.  For feather frost to form, conditions must be just right.  According to studies, the latitude has to be between 45 and 55 degrees North.  There needs to have been plenty of recent rain (not a problem on Dartmoor) and lying branches or twigs, not too rotten, but fallen in recent months and nicely waterlogged.  Occasionally frost flowers sprout on the branches of trees, where the wood is dead but not yet thoroughly rotten.  My theory is that well-rotted wood does not retain the clearly defined pores, known as medullary rays, underneath the bark that the strands of ice must sinter through for feather frost to properly form.  The wood must be from a deciduous tree, as softwoods don’t contain the necessary rays.  Here our flowers form on beechwood.  The night should be still, clear and cold, but not too cold: around -1 or -2 degrees Celsius.  Any wind would dislodge the filaments of ice as they grow.  I’ve never stayed out all night to watch the growth of frost flowers, but I picture them pushing through the pores like pasta through the holes of a very slow, very fine spaghetti machine.

How do the ‘hairs’ of ice stay separated and distinct, rather than forming into a single chunk of ice, which is what usually happens at these temperatures?  The reason is surprising.  Like many questions in nature, the answer is a fungus.  In this case it’s Exidiopsis effusa, a waxy, greyish, low-growing species, a fact that was only determined as recently as 2015 by a team of scientists in western Germany, which discovered that it was this species of fungus that enabled the filaments of ice to segregate distinctly as they emerged from the rays in the wood.  Water near the surface of the wood freezes on contact with the cold air; more water is drawn by suction outwards away from the wood, where it too becomes ice, adding a new layer, and so on, incrementally through the night.  The chemical properties of the fungus inhibit the crystallisation processes of the ice, maintaining the slender, distinct nature of each filament.  The scientists found that in more than half their sample, Exidiopsis effusa was the only fungus present.  They then analysed the ice itself and found that it contained the compounds lignin and tannin, by-products of the life processes of the humble fungus that enables the formation of this extraordinary phenomenon. 

More feather frost

Goosander

Of all the birds’ eyes that I know, the goosander has the most expressive.  This one belongs to a ‘brownhead’ (the term given to females and immature birds), and is shining like treacle in the newly materialised sunlight.  Drops of water cling below the splendid scarlet bill that, together with the rich brown hatchet-shaped head, lends something of the dragon to this satisfyingly shapely bird.  The stiff December wind tugs the duck’s chestnut crest into a ragged brush in the brief moments when its head is not submerged.  Then the head is immersed to just above the eyes, snorkelling for trout.  Each time the head emerges it seems brighter, fresher than before, the limpid eye echoed in water droplets that catch the light, then roll down.  The pale grey breast is barred obliquely with transverse brownish stipples.  The dense, low-slung, kayak-shaped body is similarly marked, as though the sculptor is taking a break before whittling off those last flecks of bark on the flanks to reveal the shining heartwood beneath.  Eye, bill, crest and tea-toned peaty water glow still more brightly as a rainbow forms behind.

New Year's Day walk from Prince Hall Hotel

My annual New Year's Day walk with guests from Prince Hall Hotel went well, with five of us (and three dogs) managing to somehow dodge the worst of the weather and get back in time for lunch at the hotel.  A biting gale, sunshine, rain, hail and rainbows accompanied our walk out to the Swincombe valley and back, via Rue Lake Great Ford and the ruined farms at Swincombe.  Very little wildlife, with most birds lying low because of the wind, but we did have four Teal, a Reed Bunting and a fleeting glimpse of a hunting Merlin.  Many thanks to Ann, Steve, Judy and Pete for braving the conditions to take part in an enjoyable excursion!

Looking down the West Dart towards Bellever and Laughter Tors.

Judy, Pete, Steve and Ann (with Ziggy, Barney and Phoebe).  The Swincombe valley behind.

Rainbow and Bellever Tor.

Returning to a sunlit Prince Hall Hotel.

Happy New Year!

Misty sunshine and rainbow over the O Brook