Mostly Mosses

With the chilly weather continuing, there haven't been many insects to look at, so this week I turned my attention to a group I've never really looked at before. At the start of the week my moss list stood at a rather dismal 3 species out of the around 600 that can be found around the UK, so I thought I'd see what I could do to improve that. I signed up to the Grasses, Sedges, Rushes, Mosses, Lichens & Ferns group on Facebook, and am extremely grateful to the help I've received there, without it, my enthusiasm for mosses might have been extremely short-lived. Instead, over the course of the week I've managed to more than triple my list, to a mighty 10 species! I've enjoyed poking about looking at a set of species that I've previously ignored, and starting to get to grips with the common species.

First on my new moss list is the aptly named Common Feather-moss, an extremely common moss in the woods at The Lodge, which has feather tendrils, coating the bases of trees and numerous patches of deadwood. Out on the heath I added a couple more common species, Broom Fork-moss and Cypress-leaved Plaitmoss, and rounded off a successful outing by adding a non-moss to my list, the cute little blue weevil Ceutorhynchus erysimi, which was conveniently wandering along a fencepost just after I'd bumped into Mark, who's currently writing some brilliant guides to weevils.

Common Feather-moss

Broom Fork-moss

Later in the week I had another lunchtime wander, this time heading up to the iron-age hillfort in the hope of finding new species. It didn't take long to find some, galley hill was blanketed in heath star-moss (good names these mosses have), up in the pine trees by the hillfort was a small patch of bank haircap. and a thick branched moss underneath the heather proved to be Neat Feather-moss.

Heath Star-moss

Bank Haircap

Neat Feather-moss

After that I'll admit to cheating a little bit, and looking at the records for the reserve to see if any of them gave specific locations to let me do a bit of moss-twitching. A lot of records were quite vague, but a description of "pond on the front lawn" was pretty specific, and sure enough there was lots of the distinctive Pointed Spear-moss in the pond, and lots of Springy Turf-moss in the grass nearby.

Pointed Spear-moss - pointy!

Oh and just in case you thought I'd forgotten my previous like of lichens, here's one I added to my list recently, the rather elegant Oak-moss Evernia prunastri.



Hopefully we'll be seeing some warmer weather soon, but if not, at least there's still lots of natural history to be hunting for :)