First Fungal Forage

My pockets were bulging. One penknife, two cheese sandwiches, three identification guide books and countless old sweet wrappers from a previous adventure which now served merely as tantalising, mouth-watering annoyances as they rustled against one another.

The resinous aroma of pine needles and damp rotting bark gently lingered in the forest like a fine mist that fair September morning along the Cornish banks of the River Tamar. Somewhere deep in this ancient woodland hid my edible prize, mushrooms!

I felt like the trees were watching me with bemusement as I left the path and meandered my way quietly over and around their ancient buttresses. The charming call of a perched yellow hammer faded as I strayed further into the abode of the beasts I desired. 

Earth balls -
best left to the maggots!

As a less than terrible golfer I was well accustomed to scouring the undergrowth for small, round, white lumps; thus it wasn’t long before I had my first fungal find of the day. Various species of earth ball littered the ground, they were most certainly ‘out of bounds’ as far as I was concerned.

There were plenty of mushrooms to choose from as the sound of the river lured me deeper into the forest. Some looked like they’d been individually burnt around their edge’s, another had spongy spikes hidden underneath. My favourites were those whose inner flesh, on exposure to the air, changed colour almost as fast as the leaves above me changed their shadows in the gentle breeze.

A purple one! My eyes bulged as I became magnetised to the injection of colour sprouting a few centimetres above the sodden leaf litter. “Don’t touch it!” my Mother had always cautiously advised. Most sensible people would do the same but the naughty schoolboy within me had other ideas. I was committed that day, I wanted to eat it.

Despite being a wild mushroom consumer virgin I had some experience when it came to mushroom identification. There was no doubt that this lilac specimen was the Amethyst Deceiver, an edible species. However, putting something purple with such an unpalatable name into one's gob for the first time is no easy feat. Against cautious logic and reason, curiosity waged its war; I opened my mouth and took a bite.

Three amethyst deceivers - lunch!

A beauty! Who dares wins? Perhaps, although my victory was guided by the published works of several fungal experts. Which in turn makes you wonder, how many curious but ignorant people have tried and tested tantalising toadstools only later to have their name associated with that unmistakable guidebook description 'Deadly Poisonous!'

Monkey business

Approximately 5% of vervet monkeys become binge drinkers when offered booze. They down as much alcohol as they can before they eventually fall asleep. In contrast only one out of every seven vervets decide to stay teetotal when offered a tipple or two.

As far as I'm concerned this is yet more valid scientific evidence to prove that we are related to monkeys!

Shear Suicide

An innocent enough looking puffin...

All of a sudden our vessel entered into ornithological air-space. Lancaster gannets hugged the waves whilst miniature messerschmitts and spitfires darted past one another in the guise of razorbills and guillemots. My destination was the mile long island of Skokholm off the south west tip of Pembrokeshire, Wales. My fellow zoologist Theo and I were keen to explore this SSSI, partake in some leisurely wildlife photography and depart, hopefully free of bird poo, five days later.

Home to puffins, peregrines and petrels, ravens, razorbills and wrens, shearwaters, shellduck and shags, gannets, guillemots and gulls it is clear that birds find Skokholm an attractive place to live. Yet despite being thought of as chiefly an avian island we soon discovered many of the other beasts that reside there.

Glistening sea gooseberries, formidable spider crabs and baby pollack navigated the kelp forest in the calm waters of the landing bay. Wearing nothing more than a pair of pink and brown, Hawaiian-style boardies I braced myself and leapt into this cold underwater jungle. Within minutes a curious, young, grey seal began circling beneath me. Through my misted goggles I could just about make out her ghostly, white blotched belly, however, just like females of my own species, she kept her distance from my strange, white, gangly physique.

Clearly a beast of a slow worm!

We found no less than twenty-six individual slow worms tangled up and basking under sheets of corrugated iron near to our camp and I nearly squashed the first recorded cinnabar moth of the year as it dozed in the sun on a clump of wind-swept sea campion. The island was teeming with life of all shapes and sizes.

However, over the course of our visit it felt as though the avian inhabitants of this rocky outcrop were becoming increasingly hostile towards our mammalian invasion. It was on our third day that the first of a trilogy of attacks began.

Perhaps it mistook that hair cut
for a tasty rabbit..?

A rather plump and angry sounding lesser black-backed gull took offence at Theo photographing some razorbills and instantly began mobbing his head. After several gull dive-bombs Theo finally surrendered his position to the enemy, the birds had drawn first blood (metaphorically of course).

The second attack came under the cover of darkness. I had ventured out of my room to answer a call of nature. As I stumbled around I could hear the eerie sound of thousands of Manx shearwaters returning from a day’s fishing over the Atlantic. I had just finished providing the nettles with their periodic dose of nitrates when a kamikaze shearwater flew silently but rapidly into the side of my head. The sensation was not indifferent to the combined shock and pain experienced when walking into a lamp post (trust me I’ve been that victim... twice). I held my, now throbbing, right ear and just about heard the shocked murmurings of an embarrassed Manxie as it crashed into the freshly hydrated nettles. It wasn't there the next morning so I can only hope it found its burrow before the gulls found it.

One sand-eel sticky (and stinky) bomb.

I was starting to recognise that this island truly does belong to the birds, yet on the final evening as I began to photograph the comical yet charismatic puffins at Crab Bay I neglected any threat. As the sun began to set they were still busy ferrying tiny fish back to their hungry chicks which lay hidden in the vast network of burrows beneath our feet. One after another they would flash over my head like miniature clowns being fired from a cannon but as I tried to capture a snapshot of the action I found myself victim to the final bout of bird bullying. Stuck to the inside of my lens hood was no less than a silvery, half-squashed sand eel. One of the ‘charming’ little auks had dropped a fish bomb on me. Alfred Hitchcock eat your heart out!

What did you do when you were in India?

Monsoon rains quickly turned MCBT into a
croc-infested swimming pool

I regularly get asked this question from friends infected with that itchy condition known as the travel bug. However my answer is perhaps not as familiar as they may expect. I did not eat fish curry in Goa, nor did I fight through cosmopolitan crowds in Mumbai or marvel at the Taj Mahal, instead I found myself living side by side with toothed predators at the Madras Crocodile Bank Trust (MCBT).

This reptile zoo is approximately 45km south of Chennai, just north of the coastal tourist destination of Mamallapuram. Set in a miniature oasis of indigenous forest the ‘centre for herpetology’ is home to a vast collection of crocodilians including India's three native species, the extremely rare gharial, the enormous saltwater crocodile and the mugger. It was with this final member of the trio whom I would become personally acquainted.

I had arrived in southern India in October and been welcomed by its sticky, pre-monsoon climate. Each evening both staff and volunteers at MCBT would cool off with a swim in the Bay of Bengal, often at exactly the same moment the thunderclouds above released their pent up energy with violent bolts of lightning. After dark the excitement continued. Venomous snakes lay camouflaged in the leaf litter, malarial mosquitoes tested my insect repellent and stinging centipedes found their way under my sweat-sodden pillow each and every night.

Yet it was after a typical morning breakfast of egg and rice that a new peril presented itself. The larger adolescent mugger crocodiles in ‘Pen 8’ needed to be translocated before they started to gnaw on their younger siblings. I couldn’t help thinking that if a crocodile can get ideas about chewing on another leathery scaled beast surely it wouldn't think twice about trying to nibble a nice soft-skinned snack from Surrey!

Carrying a mugger in muggy weather
is not a mugs game!

Lassoing hungry crocodiles on an artificial island surrounded by a crocodile-infested moat armed only with a long stick is an adrenaline rush to say the least. By lunchtime we had already delivered ten of the biggest animals to their new enclosure. However it was with the last capture that things almost went terribly wrong. 

We had roped, leapt upon and bound the powerful jaws of a two and a half metre long female before three of us heaved her up off the ground. In synchrony we began to cross the metre-wide moat when, just as I had one leg on either side of the murky water, our passenger began to thrash. I lost my balance and felt myself begin to fall backwards, croc too. In a split second decision I plunged my naked foot into the water in an attempt to prevent my whole body being at the mercy of any submerged mugger lurking below.

Thankfully my foot collided with concrete rather than croc and after a quick count no toes had been eaten, or should I say mugged...

The largest resident at MCBT, a saltwater crocodile named JAWS III