It’s autumn, and autumn means for me not just leaves in gutters and sorting the sheep, but walking my land, slowly, with careful footsteps, eyes down, playing a competitive and nerdy game with myself, my land, and some friends.
Why? Well right now is ‘spot the waxcap’ time, and I am not afraid to say it’s an excellent and addictive game I absolutely love playing. Waxcaps, to the uninitiated, are grassland fungi that (mostly) have waxy looking caps and gills (hence the name). They live in old pastures, churchyards, lawns and on verges, there are about 50 different ones in the UK, and some are very rare indeed. They are bright yellow, scarlet, green, pink, or dingy brown, and there is a learned skill in spotting them, half hidden in the grass, camouflaged like autumn leaves. Add to that the difficulty in identifying them once you’ve found some and the online unserious competition (and freely given help), and you get a highly entertaining way to walk the dogs.
But this year my waxcap wanders are edged with worry. Because waxcaps in this brave new world of carbon capture and land use change are in serious danger.
Fragile fragments of a past world
When we think of fungi most of us think of the woods, and while some waxcaps do pop up in woodland most of them evolved to thrive in grazed grassland. Those areas where the big herds would have slowed and eaten their fill, or laid up in bad weather, places with good sight lines and wolf outrunning potential. Open wood pasture would have been their home before fields were a thing. They took to hay meadows and farmed pasture like ducks to water. Cutting and grazing mimicked the old herds.
The problem is they are not robust. They get damaged easily. I’m not meaning the fruiting bodies, the visible fungi, which get bashed about and kicked over all the time, living as they do out in the open where the herbivores roam, as long as the damage is not prolonged and extensive they will be fine. It’s the underground world of soil ecology that is the problem. One plough, one heavy top dressing of fertiliser, one year too many of long grass suppressing the moss they need, or tree encroachment with their different fungal networks (which wage war on waxcaps), and they are gone. Maybe not all at once, but one by one they disappear from their land, erasing possibly thousands of years of that site’s continuous fungal history.
Once they have been damaged it is even worse news, when they are gone they can be gone for good. 50 years is a conservative estimate for basic recovery of the strongest species from extensive damage, while some sites will never recover. They can’t be easily transplanted or ‘reseeded’ (re-spored?) unlike rare plants, which adds into the issue.
A lightly damaged site (mine) next to a good site (also mine) has taken 15 years to get a handful of the more robust waxcaps back, in low numbers since we gave up on the bagged fertiliser. It will take decades of low input management (only muck, only in small amounts) and careful grazing to get the full range back, I probably won’t live long enough to see all the damage done undone.
The perfect storm of harm.
We have a perfect storm brewing, where waxcaps are an unseen casualty.
The government is pushing for farmers to make more from less, which means we need to work our land harder, more livestock, more chemicals, more ploughing, more reseeds or herbal lays (yes herbal lays, that great god of regen, if seeded on old pasture is a destroyer of waxcaps). At the same time we have a new way of making money from land, carbon credits from trees, where you get paid by the taxpayer to plant trees that you can then monetise via offsetting others’ carbon emissions.
We have a government carbon budget that wants less livestock, and those animals still kept are to be intensively, precisely, managed for fast growth and low emissions, rather than outside grazing old fields.
Then there is BNG, which encourages the idea you can always undo damage, which also holds a dark temptation to covertly damage land so you can be paid by others to fix it.
We have a very vocal, and in my case local, minority pushing to rewild land or lower grazing numbers for the good of biodiversity and the climate, which goes hand in hand with eNGOs looking for a easy win (government funded trees or land abandonment play well with the membership).
We also have a strange governmental focus on ‘landscape recovery’ rather than ‘landscape protection’, which for a non-recoverable species is bad news…
And we have garden centres, garages, farm stores and supermarkets all with an aisle of destruction. Lawn care chemicals are death to waxcaps, (tight mowing is not).
So we spray, abandon, plough, and plant trees to our hearts’ content, often with a feeling of moral superiority, while almost nobody notices the half hidden fungi slipping through our fingers.
Old pasture, new problems.
We all have heard the depressing figure of 97% of species-rich meadows lost since 1930, and the uplands are no longer sheep and cattle pastures but dense scrub, bracken and mono-molinia instead. The old farms are easy pickings nowadays, painted as sheep-wrecked and struggling, natural capitalists eyeing up the carbon potential and just waiting for the dispersal sale. The money is in trees, not livestock, and waxcaps, unrecorded, unnoticed, get cheerfully kicked aside.
We desperately need support, both financial and moral, for what we have left, both the waxcaps and the livestock farmers they rely on. Yet where the grass is short enough for waxcaps it’s vilified, we are told it is a sign of ecocide, and to be fair at times it’s not great. The sour smell of sheep piss that lingers on the leewards of any outcrop on Dartmoor does not tell a good story. It tells of a system with a cog missing. The shepherd with the daily ‘gather and move’ the uplands had for centuries was lost after World War One. Sheep left out to fend for themselves found their favourite place and settled in for the duration. So undergrazing and overgrazing sit side by side, but where the grazing happens, away from the overly fertilised cudding spots, the waxcaps still thrive. They don’t care about the other plants grazed out of the sward, or parasite burdens, they just need somewhere where they can easily push past the friendly moss and spread their gills to the winds.
Regen – a solution or a problem?
Into this battle a new player has stepped. Regenerative agriculture. A slightly vague term whose meaning shifts depending on who’s talking, but based on some pretty solid principles. Soil health, soil cover and grazing animals. This should be a movement that will save the waxcaps, but it is often one of the tools of destruction. Long grass grazing works wonders for soil health, the graze a third, trample a third and leave a third is brilliant if you need to get that soil food web buzzing, but for a waxcap, pushing through dense thatch and strong grasses it is hell. Some species seem to have a symbiotic relationship with moss, others are just too weak to push through the grass. A solid old-fashioned tight graze after the hay cut, or after the seeds have set in species-rich pasture, is miles better for them, but when did you last hear that being mentioned as a good way to manage your land? When did you hear, in regen circles, that mossy close-cropped pastures are cool?
To be fair though, most of the land regen farming is happening on is not waxcap land. It’s ploughed, fertilised and used to exhaustion already, and any soil improvment can only be a good thing. It’s where the crossover happens that the issues lie, like where old pastures are seen as needing a boost so grazing management is changed, or where high density wood pasture is encouraged as a way to help the land face our uncertain future. Then there is the winter stockpile idea, (that used to be called foggage by my mum years ago) with grass grown for the cattle to munch through all winter, grasses that are at their densest just when the waxcaps need light and air. Such a sensible idea, no need for hay making, or housing cattle, a collar or electric fence is all that’s needed, often done on the marginal land that is difficult to manage. Pushed by eNGOs and charity landowners along with light conservation grazing that leaves a long sward, as the best way to farm. Another nail in the coffin of the fungi if done in the wrong place.
So what do we do?
Having painted a picture of such doom and gloom what on earth can we do to help?
I guess the first and most important thing is to have a wander about on any grazed land you know. Get off the quad, out of the cab and have a look. If you don’t know what you’ve got how can you look after it? You’ll need to do it now though, this week. The season is short and pretty much already over!
The first step is to look and see if you have any fungi in your fields, and if so are any ‘waxy looking’. Then how many different colours you have, waxcaps are often bright red, yellow, orange or even pink, look for the colourful ones. They can be tiny (fingernail sized) or as large as your fist, so it may take a minute to spot them. Any grassland fungi is worth looking at, and there are, as you would expect nowadays, apps to help. A basic fungi identification app (don’t rely too much on them as they can be ‘odd’) is fine to start with and once you have an idea of what to look for a waxcap specific app like (I kid you not) ‘Peachy Steve’s waxcap app’ is great. There are also books and a whole new language to learn if you want (gills decurrent, stipe fibrous, cap umbonate…) but so what? We can learn new stuff when we need to.
Then, having found a good spot we look after it. Us, personally. We don’t wait for a knight (or civil servant,) in shining armour with a suitcase of cash, we just do what we need to… Graze and cut and survey. Let the experts in and listen to them (rather than just a random overly enthusiastic woman on the internet). Keep your eyes peeled on ground earmarked for change, where the trees are being planted, where the rewilding doesn’t include livestock. Push for eDNA surveys (they can test the soil for fungal DNA) when land use is changing from grazing or meadows and record your finds so nobody can conveniently ‘not know’ about them. Maybe write to your MP asking for help. Talk to your neighbours. Enthuse! Be vocal about the small wonders we have.
And do get nerdy and competitive. It’s a fun game after all, wandering about looking at the ground as the leaves fall, the redwings return and the year turns towards winter, and we all need a bit of fun now and then! And if the weather means you’ve missed this year’s main crop there can be late ones that can pop up past Christmas, and next year’s autumn will be here before you know it (just after Christmas and Easter and the summer holidays…).
