Country diary: there's life to be found in the deadwood

Heavy rain has provoked Laxton’s Brook, a dry channel all summer, to enter dramatic spate. Twice now in October the brown waters have coursed across the fields and through the woods behind Lower Benefield. The bridge carrying the A427, which partially collapsed in the 2016 flood, remains firm. Upstream, in the spinney, the water has spread through the trees so it now resembles an everglades swamp. Fallen boughs and trunks partially block the water course, slowing its pace and creating little rapids.

Deadwood in rivers and streams is tenderly hailed as “woody debris”; this superficially disparaging term underplays its importance to the natural functioning and ecology of the river. Slowing water and preventing downstream floods, creating pools and habitats favoured by fish, such deadwood also has special inhabitants: scarce and endangered insects including logjammer hoverflies (Chalcosyrphus eunotus) and rare yellow splinter crane flies (Lipsothrix nigristigma), whose larvae burrow in sodden logs.

These particular big ash logs are home to various fungi, including little semi-translucent blobs of the white brain fungus (Exidia thuretiana) and the magnificently wobbly brown fruiting bodies of the Auricularia auricula-judae, commonly known as wood ears or jelly ears. This is an unusual sighting as it almost always grows on elder.

Upstream, again, the brook meanders through a grassy sheep field and then beyond that it scours over arable fields. Soil has a tendency to creep downhill through the actions of worms, water, frost and ploughs, so it must be troubling to the farmer that the brook runs through the field’s low point, skimming the valuable topsoil off into the River Nene.

That’s not the only concern. The sparse yellowed grasses are testament to recently sprayed herbicide, and who knows how much pesticide has been washed off these fields directly into the water course? It will have been diluted by the large volume of water – still, not ideal.