What a gorgeous photo - that’s an amazing sky!
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Lovely festive raspberry red tiny spheres on a fallen tree. Am hoping @ramblingjohn will help me out with ID.
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The slime mold Trichia decipiens may be a good starting point.
diolch am llun - thanks for the photo.
Cheers J.P.
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Diolch i ti. Couldn’t decide if it was slime or fungus.
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The lovely people at dubanci.cz have created a Christmas card template for sharing. Seems particularly appropriate for this thread.
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I was labouring under the delusion that you lived in a region where it snowed every winter! Nadolig Llawen!
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Well, it usually does snow sooner or later every winter; we even have a blizzard now and then! But we rarely actually have snow for Christmas. And it was 60F (about 15C) just a few days ago!
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& a very festive Red Cardinal!
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A couple of the birds seen on my walks by the river this week. The ice has gone and there’s no snow!
Hwyaden Lygad Aur - Goldeneye
Bras Melyn - Yellowhammer
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Somehow quite festive-looking ffwng on a birch stump in my garden (I’ve convinced myself it’s not honey fungus - I hope I’m right because there’s a live silver birch - bedwen arian - next to it 
- @ramblingjohn @pippapritchard ? )
… and for once I remembered to take a picture of the underside!
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da iawn ( velvet shank - Flammulina velutipes) dwi ddim yn gwybod enyw yr cymraeg).
Bydd’n tyfu hapus pan yr tymheredd islaw sero - will grow happily when the temperature is below zero.
Heddiw - today.
Titw mawr - Great tit.
Titw tomos las - blue tit.
Cheers J.P.
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Diolch @ramblingjohn - one other thing I noticed was that it was surprisingly resistant to being tugged away from the stump - for such a little thing it just didn’t want to let go.
Hwyl, John
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Lwcus iawn to have this in your garden.
“Coesyn melfed” yn ôl fy llyfr i - according to my book.
On honey fungus - does anybody know the time scale between honey fungus deciding to live on a tree & the tree succumbing? Although that presumably depends on the health of the tree to start with. Is it always a death sentence? There is a lot of honey fungus around here & a number of old fallen trunks with the ‘bootlaces’ but also a lot of seemingly healthy trees. Pic is of bootlaces in an Ash - Onnen which had fallen, but was sprouting new growth from it’s base.
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Helo @pippapritchard - what I’ve heard is bascially what you’ve said, i.e. that some trees appear to be perfectly healthy even when there’s honey fungus all over the place.
My guess is that some species are more susceptible than others and that genetic variation within species is a big factor as well but that it can probably infect pretty much everything (apart probably from the hunllef Japanese Knotweed 
) but also that quite a few things if completely healthy to begin with can grow reasonably well until affected by something else, e.g. insect attack, other disease, lack of nutrients or just aging, so survival time is probably extremely variable.
So in summary… Sorry Pippa, I don’t really know 
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Blwyddyn Newydd Dda - Happy New Year. While trying, and failing, to get a better shot of a Goldeneye duck - Hwyaden Lygad Aur, I noticed this in the river this morning.
Not a great picture, but it is a Morlo - Seal, some eight miles upstream from the sea.
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Wow that must have been exciting to witness. Doesn’t that happen often?
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There are plenty of seals in the estuary from the colony on the Farne Islands but they don’t usually venture as far upstream and only when the river is relatively high - it is about 3 ft. above summer levels at the moment. It can be disconcerting to hear “heavy breathing” early in the morning coming from the water, but that has only happened to me once in twenty years of walking the bank.
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I remember there being one in Carmarthen under the new(ish) bypass bridge some years ago. I suppose that’s a few miles from the sea. I always look when I go over that bridge, just in case I see another one.
I’ve just read that three years ago, a grey seal from the Deeside colony lost his way and ended swimming some 50 miles to a field near St Helens: Nicola Watkinson, who works at the nearby Red Bank Farm Shop, said: "Someone rang up this morning and said there’s a great big sea lion outside our shop. " 
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