November is a strange month somewhere in between autumn and winter proper.
Yet, as always with nature, there’s plenty to enjoy if you just get outdoors, whatever the weather.

Shop ‘til you drop on some Waxwings

At last, after many blank winters, this one is turning out to be a ‘waxwing winter’ (the last time we had one was in 2012/13). When there’s a scarcity of food on the continent, these bird ‘irrupt’ and fly west for the winter. Flock of hundreds have been seen in Scotland and, once they have deplete the berries there, they will move south.

Waxwings come from the forests of Scandinavia and Russia so will have seen few if any human beings.
Yet once over here, they fly straight to those supermarket and retail park car parks where berry-bearing shrubs such as rowan or Cotoneaster have been planted ignoring the ‘head-down’ shoppers all around them.
I vividly remember watching a large flock gathered in trees on a central reservation in urban Sheffield, waiting for the chance to fly down to some berries in a busy car park across the busy road. No one else even noticed them.

Cotoneaster colour
There are over two hundred species and ‘varieties’ of Cotoneaster, a shrub which originated in China and the Himalaya. Some such as the often planted C. frigidus, have large leaves and berries whereas others, like the one in my garden, has very small ones. (Indeed the flowers are also tiny though the bees swarm around them in summer). Just now the large cotoneaster in the garden is a riot of autumnal colour though the blackbirds have eaten most of the red berries.

A mixed blessing

Fifteen ‘escapee’ species are listed in The Flora of Derbyshire as growing in the wild but most are very rare.
One Cotoneaster in particular, Cotoneaster horizontalis, is very invasive and you may well have noticed it growing on cliff faces in disused limestone quarries and along the Tissington and High Peak Trails.

(If you don’t have a copy of the wonderful Flora of Derbyshire, you can see a slightly out of date distribution maps for all species on this very useful website:
Flora of Derbyshire - Cotoneaster horizontalis sens.str. (Wall Cotoneaster) (kevinhutchby.uk) )

Nature table or museum display?
My photo of a home-made nature table, this week, in an idle moment, I set up my ceramic woodcock in the hallway and surrounded it with some ‘habitat’.

Autumnal bird nests

Too small to see properly on my nature table were some birds nest fungi I saw four or five years ago.
They were growing on woodchip in the garden at Darley Abbey Park in Derby. This one is the striated birds nest fungus, Cyathus striatus,  though two other species were also present. Peter Smith, my mycologist friend, had told me about them but I had to search for over half an hour before I found any myself…..they are indeed very small!

Wilding revisited
If one book has completely changed the nature conservation world it is Isabella Tree’s Wilding (along with a failing farm estate in Sussex). Remarkably that book is now five years old and it’s high time I read it again.
 

Remember if you see anything whilst you're out and about this Autumn, please do let us know through the Derbyshire Biological Records Centre webpage: here