Our daughter Lizzie has been off truffle hunting in Italy this week:

The dog found four white truffles whilst Lizzie and Sheff were with them. The truffle mycelium forms a symbiotic relationship with the tree roots where the truffle gets sugars from the tree and the tree gets water and minerals from the truffle mycelium. When the time is right, a truffle fruiting body will form which develops slowly underground. The fruiting body wants to be eaten in order to disperse and so develops an alluring smell which gradually gets stronger as it matures. By October, the smell is detectable above ground by truffle-hunting dogs although foxes, squirrels, mice, badgers and wild boar will also be trying to dig them up to eat. They will then spread the truffle spores in their droppings.

Autumn truffle hunting in Northern Italy looked very lovely indeed and how I wished that I was there too.

Another daughter, Sally, lives in the village of Wye in the North Downs of Kent. There has been a church in the heart of the village since early Saxon times but the early church was restored and enlarged in the 15th century to what we see today.

Recently the church has launched an adopt-a-grave scheme to care for some of the older graves in the graveyard:

Sally and I have adopted the grave of Clara Dixson:

Clara was the wife of the then Vicar of Wye, but she died in 1887 aged thirty-five from complications arising from the birth of her fifth child:

I would love to know what happened to her four other children who lost their mother when they were so very young. At the back of the gravestone there is another inscription – it was very moving to see that her husband had came back to join her when he too passed away in 1919:

We hope that our family will now care for Clara, Clarence and John’s grave for many years to come. For now Sally and I have weeded it and planted miniature daffodils and grape hyacinths, but we will do more in the spring:

Back in August we counted 149 female wasp spiders sitting on their webs out in the meadows:

We marked some of the web positions with sticks, hoping to return later to find the egg cocoons. These are constructed low in the grasses close to the web and held in place with sticky threads:

They are large, with a diameter of around 3cm, and so should be easy to find but so far we have failed to locate a single one. The same cannot be said for the magpies, however:

I had not realised that magpies were eating the wasp spider cocoons, although perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised because they seem to consume most things.

This autumn a pair of kestrels are hunting in the meadows and I’m always pleased to see them together. In this photo the female is on the perch and the male is on the camera:

Last autumn there was more than one barn owl here and I knew this because one of them was ringed and the other one wasn’t. This year there have unfortunately been far fewer sightings of barn owls generally and I haven’t yet seen a ringed bird:

It is an unusual sight to see pheasants in the meadows but two females arrived this week. The pheasant shooting season began on 1st October but these two will definitely be safe from guns here:

However, I cannot guarantee them complete sanctuary, as this photo from 2023 shows:

A great deal of excavation has been going on at one of the badger burrows in the last few weeks:

Small bones have been coming up to the surface in these diggings. This week there was even part of a jaw bone and we now realise that these must be badger bones:

If a badger dies underground, it is thought that the other badgers will seal it up in a chamber whilst it decomposes. This badger must surely have been young because there is hardly any wear at all on those molars:

The dog still needs to be walked even when the heavy rain and violent winds of Storm Benjamin are raging over the meadows. I finish this week with my moth of the week which is a Palpita vitrealis. It was blown out of the hedgerow and landed onto the back of Dave’s waterproof in the midst of the fuming tempest.

The clocks go back tomorrow and we enter the dark part of the year. I think I am going to have to suspend the Moth of the Week segment now until we can triumphantly resume in the spring.