Nature Notes - October 2025
Sickleholme Nature Notes
Having been absent from the course for much of October, I am particularly grateful to those who offered contributions for the notes. Several mentioned the autumn colours, delightfully described by Simon Allen as a “rhapsody in green, mustard yellow and burnt orange”. When the sun shone, the course really did look magnificent.
The dry summer together, with some beneficial Spring weather, favoured some of our larger trees and particularly the Oaks and Horse Chestnuts. Indeed, if you were “rained on” by acorns, as happened in several places, then you were experiencing oak mast which is an occasional phenomenon that produces exceptional numbers of acorns in a year. Similarly, near the second green the ground was stacked with the fall from one Horse Chestnut tree.
Bird records included the expected passage of Pink-footed Geese, with c170 seen by Trevor Hoyland and myself on the 9th of the month, plus reports of skeins seen or heard by several other members. Paul Ince was the first to report winter thrushes with 30 Redwing on the 15th, and Patrick mentioned a Sparrowhawk actually perched on the clubhouse feeding station. Elsewhere, Pheasant numbers seemed up but it is the time of year when many are released by the shooting community.
There was no response to last month’s request for anyone with the expertise to identify more of our fungi, but I was pointed to an app which I downloaded to my mobile phone. One of this month’s photo images is an early result, with the species said to be Sulphur Tuft. There seems to be a number of apps now that can assist with identifications from the natural world, and I am now experimenting with a couple of them.
Please do let me have your November sightings/observations as they add much to our knowledge of the course.
Bryan Barnacle
Fallen Acorns
Sulphur Tuft