THE cattle grazing on the Rifle Range and Devils Spittleful Nature Reserves have been munching away on the heath.

Their choice of food has been the patches of acid grassland, which is part of the heathland plant community mosaic.

It is defined by wavy hair grass, so called because of the way that the fine stems that hold the grass's flowers are crimped and closely resemble a single strand of hair taken from the head of a person with curly or wavy hair.

This grass, however, is not the only plant that makes up the acid grassland community. In the grassy tussocks you will find the spearhead-shaped leaves of Sheep's Sorrel and the curly whorls of leaves of the heath bedstraw.

The cattle have found all these plants most palatable, so now when you look at the acid grassland areas you suddenly become aware of the diversity of lichens and mosses that also form an important part of these areas.

As a rough rule of thumb, the lichens are a blue-green colour while the mosses appear a deep lush green.

The lichens are principally from the lichen family known as cladonia, which like all lichen is a symbiotic fusion between a fungus and algae. If you take the time to give these strange plants a closer look you will find they are among the most beautiful on the heath.

Cladonia portentosa has wonderful branching stems that make them look like miniature briar patches.

Unfortunately this was nearly the undoing of this lichen species, as model railway enthusiasts commonly harvested it to add to the scenery of their model railway set-ups.

In early spring, the first colour to sweep across the heath comes from the flowers of the lichen cladonia floerkeana.

This produces large, vividly scarlet spore-producing bodies which appear in great numbers making patches of the heathland look as though someone has scattered millions of red-tipped matchsticks across the site.

When mosses flower in spring, the brownish, yellow flowerheads briefly change the landscape of some of the acid grassland areas, due to their abundance. To me, the beauty of mosses lies in their texture. Each of the 21 or so species found on the Rifle Range has a very different but pleasant texture. My particular favourite is hypnum cupressiforme, which forms little carpets of silken whorls of leaves.