Stump Puffballs.
19th January 2022
Things are a little quiet on the wildlife front at the moment but at least the weather has improved, with clear days and frosty nights, which is infinitely preferable to the dull overcast drizzly days of a couple of weeks ago. This week Susan and I were walking up a little enclosed path near to where we live in the hope of finding a few fungi. Last year the Jelly or Wood Ear fungi was abundant but this year it’s very scarce. Similarly with the Holly Parachute fungi although that is never abundant. We did come across some Stump Puffballs which looked ready to disperse their spores, and indeed by just touching them a small cloud of spores shot out.
This gave me an idea for a short video and the following day I took some kit up to try and capture this spore dispersion on video. Surprisingly it had rained heavily the previous night and the holly hedge above the puffballs was soaking wet, the leaves holding quite a bit of water.
I set my Canon 5D Mk IV up with a 100mm f2.8 macro lens on a tripod quite low down, just about level with the puffballs and manually focussed on the scene. I gently shook the Holly hedge and as I suspected water droplets fell on to the puffballs expelling their spores. After all this is what happens in nature when it rains or when a bird comes into contact with fungi for instance.
I set the cameras video format to 120 FPS and tried to capture the scene in slow motion.
Please see video below and also in the video tab on the front page of this site.
https://youtu.be/0CNf9RhJ9cI
This gave me an idea for a short video and the following day I took some kit up to try and capture this spore dispersion on video. Surprisingly it had rained heavily the previous night and the holly hedge above the puffballs was soaking wet, the leaves holding quite a bit of water.
I set my Canon 5D Mk IV up with a 100mm f2.8 macro lens on a tripod quite low down, just about level with the puffballs and manually focussed on the scene. I gently shook the Holly hedge and as I suspected water droplets fell on to the puffballs expelling their spores. After all this is what happens in nature when it rains or when a bird comes into contact with fungi for instance.
I set the cameras video format to 120 FPS and tried to capture the scene in slow motion.
Please see video below and also in the video tab on the front page of this site.
https://youtu.be/0CNf9RhJ9cI