'Prickly Wolf's Fart' Fungus; Lycoperdon echinatum or Spiny Puffball

Walking through a bracken maze on the hills above Ullswater, I was relieved to spy a stream and the promise of a way out.  The bracken thinned as I approached, and gave way to long grass underneath my feet.  Something metallic looking in the grass caught my eye.  It looked foreign in the environment, and my first thought, when I clocked it's rounded, slightly flattened shape, was that it was a child's purse that had been dropped.  Closer inspection revealed that the coppery-coloured mass was not rigid but soft and easily dented, and the projections that I had taken to be jewels were, infact, spines.  When I pressed it, it let out a jet of darkly coloured spores from the underside.  I knew what it was; a puffball.

I did not immediately recognise it as a spiny puffball, because as you can see from the photo, most of the spines are missing!  However, this is something that happens with age, and this puffball was certainly mature enough to puff.

The genus Lycoperdon means 'Wolf's fart', but I can't attest to it's smell, or that of a wolf's to be fair!  Echinatum means prickly in Latin.  Maybe it does resemble a sea-urchin when it is younger and covered in spines.  It tends to grow in alkaline conditions and beech woods, and is a rare find in the UK!

Dragonfly nymph skin (Exuvia)

To be honest, the motivation for putting in a pond during the first week of lockdown was to attract these stunning creatures to the garden.  Whose spirits would fail to lift at the sight of a metallic blue damselfly or a magnificent emerald green dragonfly? And I haven't been disappointed. 

I soon was visited by a couple of red-bodied damselflies.  (Damselflies are the thin-bodied ones).  One of them kept coming back to the pond. She really seemed to like the Arrowhead plant Sagittaria. Eventually I was able to video her ovipositing.  This is when she dips her abdomen in the water to deposit her eggs.

Damselfly and dragonfly start life in the water and grow through a large number of nymph stages. Depending on the species, and also environmental factors such as the temperature, they can stay up to four years in the water! Imagine my surprise when I was clearing out the blanket weed and came across this:

 It's difficult to know what stage it's at, but already you can see those dragonfly eyes, and it's quite a predator! I put it back in the water to develop further.

I made sure my pond was planted with some reeds because the final stage nymphs climb out of the water and up the reeds, before they undergo their final metamorphosis into the flying form. 

Well, I might have to wait a while before they emerge from my pond, but today when I was visiting my mother-in-law, I took the opportunity to check on some reeds that were in a community garden.

I found a nymph skin on one of the reeds. It was empty;  it could have been long gone as they remain for quite a while.  It is still amazing to look at the skin in detail and just imagine the miraculous reorganisation of the tissue that goes on inside there!

Can't wait to catch a dragonfly emerging from my own pond!