Chris Lansdell's Birding & Nature Diary: Earthstars in Earlham Cemetery, 23 November 2019

I was lucky enough to have Ian Senior as my personal guide around his local patch of Earlham Cemetery in Norwich yesterday. It followed bumping into him by chance the previous evening at a Norfolk Butterfly Conservation talk.

The main things I wanted to see were earthstars and Ian was able to kindly show me both Striated Earthstars and Sessile Eartstars which were excellent. That wasn't it by any means though as we did a good walk all around the lovely gothic cemetery clocking up scarcities like Jellybaby, an Earthtongue sp, Orange Cup, Southern Bracket, Deathcap, Giant Polypore, Sulphur Knight, loads of Buttercaps and Variable Oysterling as well as a great range of waxcaps including Blackening Waxcap, Snowy Waxcap, Parrot Waxcap, Meadow Waxcap and the curious Slimy Waxcap. Into the bargain Ian also showed me the strange unidentifiled fungal mass that he found growing on a blewit (the bottom picture below). It is so odd that samples have been sent to Kew for analysis!

Birdwise it was great to hear calling Nuthatch which not so very long ago had virtually died out in the Norwich area.