Red on the Forest Floor

This morning I walked in Aquhorthies Wood. Calm but dull (me as well as the weather). I took two photos of trees, one in the Wood, silver birch and conifers, the other outside the wood, a line of five winter Beech trees in silhouette against the pale brightness of the Eastern sky beneath a striped cloud bank and the high, grey overcast. Intriguing and atmospheric, but not warming to my spirit.

On the floor of the Wood I found colour. A single yellow-red fungus standing proud on an old moss-and-pine-needle-covered stump could have done the trick. But I'm only allowed one Blip a day, so I finally chose this study in red-brown of a rotten hunk of old wood lying on a mattress of fallen leaves. It'll do. It cheered the spirit, for even the dead things in the Wood are actually crowding with life… When I got home and looked at the shots in the computer I discovered a single, very, very tiny beetle-thing, sitting (do they ever sit?) on the edge of the mushroom (both as yet unidentified). And the old, dead piece of wood must have been very much alive, deep within, with 'all creatures… and small'. Life at all levels.