The stump that keeps on giving

The sycamore stump in our garden is a veritable ecosystem. Yesterday I blipped a frog and a leopard slug living on it, today it has produced a fine crop of dead men's fingers.
They aren't, of course, the fingers of real dead men but rather the fruiting body of the fungus Xylaria polymorpha which is known colloquially as dead man's fingers. It is a saprobic fungus, that is to say that it gets its nutrition from dead and decaying organic matter. It is a common inhabitant of forest and woodland and usually grows, as here, from the bases of rotting or injured tree stumps and decaying wood.