Close encounters

At present I can dog-walk to the coast or I can drop down through woodland to the river valley. Today was the latter option. It's private land but no one apart from me ever goes there.  It's quite steep and there's no actual path. I don't mind because whichever way I slither  I find interesting things. Today's (clockwise from top left, not to scale) included:

*This snail hasn't come out of hibernation yet but it has lost the close companion it had. Snails seal themselves off for the winter with an operculum, a sort of protective lid with which they glue themselves to a smooth surface, sometimes, as here,  another snail. You can see the remains of an ex-snail on the left hand side of this snail's shell while on the right there's another smaller snail still attached.   

* The spotted leaf rosette of an early purple orchid is always a welcome sight. Orchids are very slow growers and can take years to establish themselves as they rely on particular associations with  mycorrhizal fungi in the soil. There used to be many more in this wood but the incursions of livestock are changing the habitat.

* This ?dor beetle was making its way through the leaf litter when I spotted it. Clearly it had very  acute sense of hearing (or vibration?) because when I opened my camera shutter it stopped in its tracks and played dead for several minutes. I repeated the noise and each time it froze. Fascinating. I've since found a very interesting article about insect hearing. It seems that insect 'ears' have evolved several times in different forms and they can be located in every part of an insect body - knees, wings, abdomen etc.  It's even proved possible to reproduce the sound made by a Jurassic insect by using the fossilized mechanism.
https://www.knowablemagazine.org/article/living-world/2018/how-do-insects-hear

* Finally, this fluffy blob is Caca de luna  or moon poo (can't resist a name like that!) It's a slime mould (Enteridium lycoperdon) that has  reached its end stage and is releasing its spores on the breeze. Last week it would have looked quite different,  a blob of pallid gunge enclosed within a delicate pearly skin, as if someone had thrown a dollop of cold rice pudding that had stuck to the tree trunk. Caca de luna is the name used in Mexico - where some slime moulds are eaten. 
(Caci also means shit in Welsh, both words come from the Latin root cacere,  to defecate)

Another interesting excursion, less than a mile from home.