Hellova afternoon!

I was meant to be staking and adding wire mesh guards to the fruit trees we planted yesterday at the reserve, but I skived off for a while and climbed up into the beech wood  to see what fungi had sprouted after a few mild, wet days. As I made my way up the slope the wind got up and I found great clouds of recently fallen leaves being swirled around the increasingly skeletonised beech trees. Every now and then, a fungus was revealed, poking out of the deep leaf layer, only to be covered by leaves again a little later. Sure enough I found a few White Saddles, Helvella crispa, a species I associate with this part of the wood, and couldn't help saying to myself that very old mycologists' joke "that's a hellova crispa" before feeling slightly foolish.