I HAVE to admit I do like autumn, much more than summer and on a par with spring.

Just like spring, during the autumn the landscape undergoes dramatic changes in colour, which can happen over relatively short periods of time as the leaves go through their autumnal colour changes. The colour changes during spring time are more or less the same every year, but every autumn is slightly different as the colours the trees go through varies with each autumn weather patterns to create a unique show each year.

In the spring, I always enjoy looking for new wild flowers as they come into bloom, out on the nature reserves around the district, whilst in autumn there are very few wild flowers to be found but there are many many interesting and occasionally beautiful and colourful fungi to find.

I have never really enjoyed mushrooms as a food, which I know is what interests a lot of people in looking for wild mushrooms, but the fascination to me is the weird and wonderful shapes and sizes the mushrooms and fungi of our nature reserves take.

Not having an interest in finding mushrooms as food is probably not such a bad thing when you go out mushroom hunting in a place like Habberley Valley as there are quite a few poisonous mushrooms in the woods that would bring the inexperienced “mushrooms for food” hunters career to a rapid and terminal end. The sandy soils of the district seem particularly well suited for growing the most deadly of all known fungi, the death cap.

Alarmingly at first glance this mushroom looks just like many others and its cap can vary considerably in colour. The clues to its identity lie in its structure.

The tell-tale signs are the stem has a ring and there is a bulb at the stem base that has a lip and looks like it is in a wrinkly bag. But even this is not a sure sign, as a slug could have consumed this vital evidence, obscuring its identification. I have frequently seen slugs, or the evidence that they have fed on this mushroom. So the fact that some wildlife has taken a bite, is no indication either, that a mushroom is good safe eating.

I have no idea whether death caps are poisonous to slugs. They contain quite a cocktail of poisons, so I would imagine they are and slugs are not renowned for their intelligence.

However, some species of caterpillars being a good example, feed on poisonous plants in order to absorb the plant’s poison into their own bodies, so that they can use this to poison any would-be predators.

If you want to gather some mushrooms for the table it would not be a bad approach to go along with someone who knows what they are doing.

There are some real treats to be found. One species you can come across reasonably easily and is not difficult to identify, is the cep or penny bun mushroom. I was watching the finals this year’s Masterchef and the competitors had to cook a dish in a French restaurant.

One of these dishes that cost many hundreds of pounds was a slice of cep on toast. They did cut the crusts off, but still!