Saturday 23 January 2010

What freeze?

I would have thought that the coldest winter for 47 years would have set things back a bit, but today I found Willow catkins starting to appear:


We had an early frost and fog today....ideal for photographing mosses. This is the recent (40 years or so) interloper from the southern hemisphere, Campylopus introflexus:


It has the most wonderful spore capsules (~2.5 mm tall):

Close-up (blogger permitting):

That's one of my favourite shots of all time.

Baeomyces rufus is a very common lichen on exposed soil, rock and old wood. The green cluster is another specimen of Campylopus, shown above:


The fruit bodies are (of course) purely fungal ( each mini-mushroom is about 2mm. tall):

2 comments:

Gill said...

Fantastic close-up shots - especially that spore capsule. First snowdrop out here today, but none of that blue sky you've got :-(

Gill

Yoke, said...

Love the close-up photos, Stuart.