Crab Apples

It looks like a good season for Crab Apples (Malus sylvestris), many of the forest's compact shrubby trees are festooned with small green and red fruits. The small apples are bitter to say the least, although that doesn't rule them out as a wild food resource; most commonly they're made into jelly to be served with pork, or roasted also to be served with meats; they're also a good source of pectin so a great addition to jams. The bark and wood are none too shabby either, the bark for creating a yellow dye and the wood is very good for turning. Though the tree and it's fruits are most valuable to the forest's wildlife; the flowers are a boon for pollinating insects, the leafs provide food for caterpillars, especially those of moths; and all manner of birds and woodland mammals enjoy the tart fruits. All round it's quite the forest provider.

Tiring work

Grubbing for acorns can be tiring work, you know. These two youngsters are enjoying a well earned snooze on full bellies, grunting and moaning as I pass, though making no attempt to get up.  It's things like coming a cross a couple sleeping pigs under an old oak tree which make the forest so magical.

Chicks

More Chicken of the Woods. It appears the forest is full of it this year, it must be a good season as I'm seeing it wherever I'm walking. One of today's finds was very fresh, and has yet to develop into the recognizable orange yellow spreading bracket of its mature form. Fungi is parasitic in nature and this Oak trunk had blobs of young Chicken of the Woods exploding all over it.  Young, it looks like this, blobby and wet, quite alien and strange, and not something that naturally shout 'eat me!' at you.