Jane Adams is looking for a rare woodland phenomenon: something fleeting, beautiful and unexpectedly personal
My mum had the most beautiful snow-white hair. Touch it, and it felt like pure silk.
I’d never heard of hair ice, but when I saw a story about it on a Devon Wildlife Trust Facebook group – with a photo of ice growing like hair from a rotting piece of wood – it reminded me of Mum’s silken locks. Ever since, I’ve dreamt of finding some.
So, on a chilly winter morning, I wrap up and go in search of this ethereal phenomenon.
What’s all the fuss about a bit of ice? Well, this is no common-or-garden ice. Oh no!
It looks like flowing white hair growing from a fallen branch – sometimes as much as 15cm long. Hair ice only forms on decaying broadleaf wood during damp, still weather when the temperature is just below freezing. As well as depending on exactly the right atmospheric conditions and the correct type of decaying wood, it also needs the help of a particular fungus.
Ordinarily, when there’s water in dead wood, it gets pushed along tiny channels to the surface, where it might form ordinary frost or ice crystals. But with hair ice, it’s thought that when the fungus Exidiopsis effusa is present, it releases substances – most likely proteins – that stop the water from forming a solid mass. Instead, each icy strand freezes individually, forming fine, silky filaments.
It’s still dark when I reach my nearest deciduous woodland. As dawn lightens the sky, I scan each rotting branch, squatting down to turn some over, cold and wet to the touch, even through gloves. As I do, the disturbed ice-rimmed leaf litter releases a full-on whiff of earthy goodness, a feel-good scent if ever there was one, and a robin sharply ticks an alarm above me.
Within half an hour, the sun breaks weakly through the skeleton branches of the trees, and all hope of finding hair ice is gone. Even a weak sun will melt it in seconds.
I may not have found hair ice today, but there will be other times. Winter has a way of hiding its most magical wonders – especially ones this rare – but one wintry morning, in the right patch of shaded woodland, I’ll find it. And I will be reminded of Mum, who would have loved to have seen it.
