Life amid the ruins

Earlier this year I blipped the remnants of a wild bees' nest in a fallen tree. Today as I passed the place I stopped to examine the cellular wax shelves that still lie  beside the path. I was interested by their resilience - the cell structure remains intact. Then I noticed that a toad had also found them and had taken advantage of the shelter they offered.  Good repurposing!

A little further along and into the shadowy wood my eye was caught by a tangerine gleam: I knew immediately what it would be. The fungus known as Chicken of the Woods or Sulphur Tuft  (Laetiporus suphureous) grows  on dead wood  and here it was glowing like an ember on an old oak trunk. I left part to sporulate and took the rest for my son. He was unlucky last year when I spotted a fungal chicken on a roadside oak tree near his home; by the time he went to get it someone else had already got it.

Both the toad and the "chicken" were making use of material that had been created for/by other living things - bees and a tree. Watching the David Attenborough film Ocean in the evening emphasised once again how destructive we humans are by trashing the seabed with its multiplicity of life forms in order to harvest (a relatively few) fish.  At the same time he emphasised that the submarine environment is one that regenerates astonishingly fast if only we leave it alone. We must do that if we are not to lose it, along with everything else.