Nick Baker's Wildlife

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Nick Baker's Wildlife

Nick Baker is a professional ‘amateur naturalist’ who loves all things with a pulse (and quite a few things without!). He works as a TV broadcaster, author, photographer and wildlife tour guide.

As the amaranthine and mauves of the heather moor slowly fade into the dark glooming green, another colour spectacular is underway. Autumn is a time of subtlety, but its palette is easily as worthy as any of the more ‘in your face’ gaudy seasons. This season sees the slow shutting down of what amounts to a light-processing factory. The hues of the famous autumnal backdrop preceding decomposition portray the last and final fling of pigments before they are reabsorbed or recycled by the system.

The greens that have shrouded the hills and filled the combes and valleys since the spring are a compound called chlorophyll. It resides within the tissues of plants and is crucial to that fundamental process of photosynthesis: the production of sugars from water, CO2 and sunlight. Because the production of chlorophyll is stimulated by light – and there are fewer hours of this now the days are getting shorter – the plant makes less and less of it until the green machine grinds to a complete halt. Any left in the leaf slowly fades out as it is broken down and recycled. What we notice now is the other pigments in the leaf. Many of these have been here all along, masked by the dominance of green.

A group of other compounds – carotenoids – produce colours as diverse as red and yellow. These do not need light to be produced and are relatively stable and long lived. Anthocyanins, another group of compounds, can be striking red or blue and purple, and because they need sugars for their production bright sunlight tends to make for brighter autumn colours. Other pigments such as tannins, especially in species such as Oak, produce those other seasonal deep browns.

This cocktail of chemicals is highly varied. Local weather and soil conditions – and whether you are seeing them in a stand of bracken, a beech wood or a bramble patch – determine what parts of the autumn palette are picked up.

Ultimately all this dead and dying plant material hits the floor. Here it is food for many, and provides another familiar seasonal sight. Through this mulch something mysterious moves, neither plant or animal; the fungi and slime moulds part-ooze and part-grow through the dead stuff, one of few life forms that can actually digest cellulose, lignin and other tough compounds that support leaves and stems and make freshly fallen beech leaves crunchy and crisp and such a joy to kick around.

Turn over a dead leaf or an old fallen branch and you will almost certainly see them in their ‘civvies’ – a network of white or black filaments, the hyphae. Pretty much what makes up most of a fungus most of the time, this is the bit that makes them extremely proficient as decomposers. This network permeates everything; each tip generates huge penetrative pressures of over 1000lb per square inch, and at the same time they ooze digestive enzymes. The whole network of hyphae makes up a net called a mycelium, and this is the secret to its digestive success: a huge surface area.

At this time of the year these hyphae organise themselves into masses, which pulse skywards and punch into the light of our world as mushrooms and toadstools, the familiar Fly Agaric, Shaggy Ink Caps, Stinkhorns and Parasols which abound on the moor in autumn.

If all this talk of death, decay, abscission and mould is too dour for you there are plenty of tales of rebirth and conception to be told too (what are the fruiting bodies of fungi if not the creation of something splendid out of rot?)

Stare into the tannin-stained water of most of the moor’s big rivers and you will see fish. You’ve probably seen them all season, but the difference is that now some of these are big. These are the returning Salmon and Sea Trout (the migratory form of Brown Trout) completing the final leg of their journey, one which has taken them downriver and out to sea, where they have bulked up for one or more years. Now they return fighting fit. Their single-minded quest means their guts have atrophied and resources have been channelled into the production of eggs and milt within the hen and cock fish respectively. This is packaged in a toned and heavily muscled fish. The cock takes on colours to his flanks that would outshine any peacock, and his head has morphed from the practical feeding set-up to a monstrous battering ram: all tooth and jaw, the lower of which becomes upwardly hooked into a form known as a kype.

To see these fish at their best wait for a spate in one of the rivers, when water levels suddenly rise, then head to a weir or waterfall. Patience will be rewarded with a sensation of the sheer power of these fish as they torpedo their way up and against the foaming rush of water charging down off the moor. For real drama and lust one must head to the headwaters to their final destination, where the raging torrents become narrow, gravelled upland streams. Here cock fish battle with each other for a place in the stream, using their flanks and their gargoyle heads to hammer each other into submission and fight over females and the best redds (spawning grounds). Some of the streambeds are so perfect for this activity that after the fish have finished it looks like a team of navvies has been shovelling the gravel around with a spade. It’s a fantastic thing to watch as the females thrash at the gravel with their flanks, using the pressure wash to excavate a trough. The male will join her once it’s complete and together they deposit eggs and milt with further thrashing; up to 750 eggs are laid per pound of her bodyweight. Then sadly it’s back to death and decay for 95 percent of fish; exhausted they die, leaving their investment in the future to develop safe in the gravel until next spring..