Episode 2.92 - Death Watch Frass and Nightshade Berries

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On a bright early-October morning at High Ash Farm, autumn has arrived in earnest at Fox’s Grove. Horse-chestnut leaves are already brown and falling as the corky abscission layer seals each leaf from its stalk, while field maples around the field edges glow scarlet and gold in the low sun. Fallen ash trees, victims of dieback, lie among the leaf litter, and a lawyer’s wig ink cap stands at perfection before it begins to eat itself — dripping black ink that attracts flies and so spreads its spores.

Chris then kneels beside a sycamore that has been down only a year. Its trunk is patterned with neat piles of fresh white frass. Blowing the dust away reveals the tiny holes of furniture woodworm (Anobium punctatum) and the slightly larger exits of the death watch beetle. He explains how the adult beetle headbutts its tunnel to make the clicking “death watch” mating call once heard in old houses, and how Harold Lefroy’s treatment of an infestation in Westminster Hall in the 1920s became the product Ento Kill — later registered as Rentokil. A fungus living in the beetles’ guts helps them digest the timber. A great spotted woodpecker works the dead crown of a nearby sycamore in search of the very beetles, and a jay pauses on the track to peck open sweet-chestnut cases before caching the nuts.

In an evening recording Chris shares his favourite moment of the day: a bucket of barley drawing some 200 mallard, now emerging from eclipse plumage, into a complete circle around him at the duck pond, joined by a teal, moorhens and waiting feral pigeons.

Later, beside a permissive walk, they examine black nightshade in flower and fruit — a close but less deadly cousin of belladonna, whose shiny black berries and reflexed, potato-like flowers still carry powerful alkaloids. Chris recalls how Italian ladies once used deadly nightshade juice to dilate their pupils, and how both nightshade and poppy seed can remain viable for a century or more.

Listener letters bring swallows pausing on a Spanish roof during migration, concern about hare coursing, drought-stressed oaks under tree preservation orders, and a pair of beautiful hand-thrown mugs from Alsager Pottery. Chris also offers free teasel seed — 10,000 seeds in a 30-gram pack — to anyone who would like to grow this wildlife plant at home.

This episode is a rich autumn miscellany of hidden lives in dead wood and late flowers — ideal for savouring the strange beauty of ink caps and frass, the nightly ritual of the duck pond, and the quiet chemistry of nightshade at High Ash Farm.

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