at the rock face

intricate and mysterious imagery from the quarry at Kit Hill. It looks like a natural (wild) version of a Japanese garden, or vice versa

a welcome visitor

a goldfinch, fat from eating thistle seed, pausing to pose. A fugitive from the flock.

the evidence accumulates

four days later the twig is bare, not a sign of a fungus or lichen. It was a cold morning but not frosty. It seems increasingly likely to me that this is ice, but I am puzzled why we only see it in areas of deciduous wood, and why I have never seen ice in this form before. A question for the New Scientist

ice fungus

at almost the same time of year last year, and under similar very frosty conditions, we found these peculiar looking excrescences on dead twigs and branches in the woods (see link for more pictures). It puzzled me at the time that I could not find anything remotely similar in the (many) reference books in Spot's library when it was so very distinctive. After much searching, we have found a similar picture on Google images, at the University of British Columbia botanical forum (link). There it is suggested that this is in fact ice, not a fungus at all. This is certainly consistent with its sporadic nature in cold weather, and it looks just like wispy snow. Can this be true? If so, finding it out is yet another demonstration of the phenomenal information power of the internet, and Google in particular.

rapt attention

heavily disguised and almost invisible in the winter canopy, a buzzard watching Spot hare about in the early morning frost.

parasol

a delicate little mushroom looking very like a Japanese parasol, one of the many mycena species.