Bagley was fun!

I got down there at about 6.20pm and had an hour and a half of very exciting, though at times quite damp, fieldwork. It was very tranquil - I met one guy out walking his dog about 30 seconds after entering the woodland and then no one else for the rest of the time.

I walked around the edge of the section I was recording and then made my way across it a couple of times. The map that has been made available to me is somewhat out of date, and some of the paths that are marked as minor have become major thoroughfares for (I guess) landrovers whilst other apparently once major tracks have been abandoned and become overgrown.

The area I was looking at was a mixture of birch, norway spruce (with beautiful carpets of old pine needles and moss), mixed oak/beech and also some more open heath-like areas, which promise to become quite overgrown with bracken as the year progresses (at present the new crosiers are just beginning to unfurl).

I made 15 stops for collections, collecting 1 or 2 spp at each site, so I've now got about 20 species to identify! I made a start on Sunday afternoon, looking at just three of them. One was Mnium hornum, which is a very common woodland moss, but it's been a while and I wanted to make sure. Another I managed to ascribe to the genus Bryum but Smith's keys stated explicitly that I couldn't get further than that without having the spore capsules - so that one will need to be re-visited at some point in the future. The third one I looked at (only briefly) was really difficult. The leaves were about 2 mm in length, very narrow and also highly incurved, making microscopic examination quite difficult. I'll have to look at that one again.

I hope to work on these over the next 10 days and then head back to Bagley sometime during the weekend after next. I didn't manage to do any sketching (at one point when it started to rain heavily I considered pausing under a tree and having a go, but the rain eased very quickly and I was back to the mosses). I did take some photos, however, of what I believe to have been Polytrichum commune - there were huge stands of it bearing immature capsules which were very striking. The light wasn't good and I used my camera's automatic metering and flash - but I'm hopeful.

A bonus was meeting some deer. They were in shaddow and too far away to be certain, but I think they were probably fallow deer, rather than muntjak but I'm not sure.