Arrhenia

While Alex was doing some gardening in Stanground, Pete and I had a walk round King's Dyke NR, which took much longer than usual to get to thanks to a combination of roadworks and heavy traffic. Our arrival more or less coincided with a huge downpour of rain and hail - sheltering under a willow tree didn't prove to be that effective! The upside of this was some glorious light once the shower had passed, complete with a rainbow.

I was again searching for fungi, and we found a good range of grassland species including Meadow Coral, White Spindles, Earthtongues, Grey Puffball and a few very sad-looking Blackening Waxcaps. But this little fungus, scarcely a centimetre in height was my favourite find of the day. It's an Arrhenia, one of the omphalinoid agaric mushrooms, some of which are parasites on mosses and lichens. They're quite a difficult genus but it looks most like A. obscurata which  is found in open, more or less disturbed, nutrient-poor habitats with scattered mosses, which is a perfect description for where I found it.