This post is for the nerdier amongst you! I’m posting it in quick succession because it is a follow-up on yesterday’s.
I was intrigued by one detail of the Old Man’s Beard seedheads.
There were two different stages of seedhead on the same vine. One stage is all fluffy, as seen on the left and the right, but another is slender and tentacled, with no fluff, as seen top and bottom:
The fluffy ones had darker seeds, that looked drier and older. So, I asked myself, where does the fluff come from, and I conducted a tiny experiment. I brought them all inside my heated house for the night, and in the morning the top and bottom ones were fluffy too, like this:
I teased out a single seed from one of the newly fluffy seed heads, and you can now see how the fluff emerges:
As it ages and dries, the whole tail corkscrews, and the fluffy feathering untwirls, starting from the seed end, and working its way towards the tail. So the fluffy parts were there all along, tightly furled against the spine of the seed.
To close, two denizens of the hedgerows, gorging on the various seeds: a grey squirrel:
And a great tit, one of a small flock flitting round in the hedgerow.
Eyes on the Wild 
Really interesting!
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