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NORWICH: Catton Park

3rd November 2013

Whilst of course I have my favourite places to watch wildlife, I also enjoy visiting places for the first time to see what is about. For a few years now I have thought that I should check out Catton Park on the northern outskirts of Norwich, but never got round to it. This summer I was looking at their website and noticed there was a Fungi walk in November, so I decided that would be a good time to visit. I arrived for the walk a bit early and was surprised that there wasn't anyone else around other than a group doing a battle re-enactment. Fungus walks and foraging are rather in vogue, so I had expected it to be quite busy. As it happened, one other person turned up (a partner of one of the people in the battle!), but the warden took us round anyway.

We concentrated on a couple of wooded areas where fungi had been seen on a earlier recce, and whilst nothing particularly rare was seen, there were some nice examples of Clouded Funnel, Stump Puffball and Shaggy Scalycap. There is an interesting species of Coral Fungus here somewhere (I've seen pictures of it on Flickr) but unfortunately it's quite a big park and we didn't see it. Overall my impressions were mixed - its clearly a nice piece of parkland if you live locally, but in my time there we saw many more dog walkers than we saw wildlife.

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