A Happy New Year to all our First Nature friends and, despite the economic gloom and the big freeze with which we start the year, may 2009 be a good one for you all. It has certainly started well for us in terms of enjoing wildlife and scenic beauty.
We visited the south of France to photograph fungi there, and we stayed on for Christmas and saw the New Year in. We also saw eagles, bearded vultures (at fairly close quarters up in the Pyrenees on the border between France and Spain; and down in the lowlands almost everywhere were those delightful birds, the lapwings. They are there in their thousands, and just as shy as our remaining few hundreds are here in our home country of Wales.
But the best sight, from a fungi enthusuast's point of view at any rate, was the vast array of sand-dune fungi on the edges of the pine forests near Bayonne. Tulostoma brumale, tiny puffballs on sticks, were everywhere... well, slight exaggeration perhaps, but they apear in their hundreds and of course in temperatures well above freezing (17 degrees on New Year's Eve) they are there right through to the end of winter.
Other fine fungi seen in the dunes included Amanita gemmata and Stropharia aurata, as well as earth tongues (Geoglossum species) and plenty of LBMs (little brown mushrooms way beyond our expertise).
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