Mycologista

Summer/fall 2011, yet another drought, but still: Red-shouldered bugs!

2012-02-01T15:44:00.000-06:00

I know it’s considered bad blogging form to apologize for a lapse in posts, but there was yet another summer/fall drought, and I kept waiting for it to end but it never did. It stopped raining, okay??? No rain = hardly any mushrooms. I lost my momentum. I kept hiking anyhow...oh, sure, I found things, some quite marvelous things, but the mushrooms, the mushrooms…some didn’t put in any appearance at all. That’s two years in a row, people! Not cool!

I even got a message from a Flickr mushroom/nature contact in Australia who noticed I hadn’t been uploading anything—she thought something had happened to me! I only know her from Flickr!

“Hello, I hope you don't mind me sending you this flickrmail... actually I'm just wondering where you are? You haven't posted anything since last October, and I hope you're ok and not terribly ill or anything. So anyway, happy new year, I hope we see you back again soon.”

Well, the past is the past, so let’s just jump back in the game! Get a load of THIS!

Red-shouldered bug on Goldenrain Tree seed, late August

I was working on campus, and these bugs were all over the building and walkways for days and days. Tiny fat nymphs, breeding pairs, and everything in between, all around some Goldenrain trees. At first I thought they were “just” Boxelder bugs, but it finally sunk in that they didn’t quite match. So I started bringing my camera in, got some photos, and did a proper ID check.

(Hi—there’s a lot of fun detail that shows up when you view these images larger, by clicking on them...)

Above, Jadera haematoloma, nymphs and instars, all over Koelreuteria paniculata, just like they say they do.

They were crazy for the seeds, very active, and when disturbed (like when I suddenly loomed over them with my camera), they only ran off for a few seconds before hurrying back to eat more.

So, in the course of learning about these bugs, I found out about Goldenrain trees too, because just about every reference mentioned them in relation to the Red-shouldered bugs, and I didn’t know what tree it was anyway when I was picking up the 3-lobed seed pods and saying, “What the heck are these.” The trees are not native, they’re from Northern China, Japan & Korea, have “invasive potential”, introduced in the early 1800’s, Thomas Jefferson, blah blah.

Anyway these Red-shouldered bugs really go for Goldenrain trees, and even though there can be seemingly-huge populations of them, no sources mentioned they do much actual damage. They feed on the fruits of lots of other trees, too.

Incidentally, I saw tiny white spikes on some of the seeds, which I would guess was some type of fungus...

Above, a whole bunch of plump little nymphs on a Goldenrain tree seed.

Below, more and more. I just thought they were awfully photogenic, creating really great compositions as they went about their lives.

If there’s tons of them around somebody’s house and they have little kids running around, and some of the bugs get squished, it can alarm parents who wonder what the heck all that red stuff is all over their kids! But the bugs are harmless.

I like the image above because you can see the insides of that one on the left! No idea what organ that is. If there’s any entomologists out there, please speak up! Really, click to view large, it's worth it.

Below, fat little nymphs and a breeding pair! Everything at once!

And finally, below, a Magritte-like composition, moody and surreal.

All this just goes to show that there are fascinating tiny things everywhere.
And I will find them, and eventually show you.

Everything but mushrooms because it wouldn’t RAIN and it was so HOT

2011-09-13T01:23:00.001-05:00

A Compilation of Forest Findings Spanning Six Weeks of Mostly-Bad Weather for Mushrooms

I wish I had tons of beautiful and wondrous mushroom pics…spring started off with a glorious wet bang, but then it got really, really HOT and there was NO RAIN for WEEKS, so all the mushrooms said, “No way, maybe we’ll catch you later if you can come up with some rain”, and I couldn’t make it rain. But I managed to scrounge up other aspects of small forest life over several weeks. There’s a few mushrooms here, from early on.

Here they are, in order of encounter. As ever, click images to view full-screen, revealing marvelous details.

A giant beast of a horsefly, on a black truck bed liner. This isn’t colorized or anything—that’s just him, steely-grey and sinister. Over an inch long. Look at those eyes! His eyes are his whole head! He was very wary--I barely got this one shot.
*9-13 Edit: This is a male Tabanus atratus, "black horse fly". The females have a little space between their eyes, the males don't. The females bite. The males don't!

A little chanterelle. This was July 9th, and things were starting to get pretty dry…but I did find a nice number of them before it got bad.

Above, a nice natural composition of Old Man of the Woods mushroom (Strobilomyces floccopus), a piece of hickory shell and a little red Russula.

Above, that’s Stan, photographing a lobster mushroom, which might seem pretty boring, except nobody finds lobster mushrooms around here! But then, I did! And word got out, and Stan, Wild-Edible-Mushroom-Hunter-Supreme-King-of-Kings, asked if I could find the spot again, and I did! He wanted to see the environment they were associated with—what kinds of trees? Overgrown or open?--etc. I mean, if Stan hadn’t found them yet, well, then they just weren’t out there. So let’s just say I was lucky, and I found the first ones ever found around here. We found the stumps of the ones I’d already cut, and I found another one! Look:

You might need to sit down for this next part. Lobster mushrooms--Hypomyces lactifluorum—are actually mushrooms being parasitized by another fungus. The Hypomyces attacks only 2 “regular” mushrooms--Lactarius or Russula (as far as we know). It turns the surface of the gilled mushroom host into a cooked-lobster orange crust, and makes the flesh white, and they get all gnarly and distorted, and it makes them taste of shellfish. Don’t believe me? Read Tom Volk’s entry and Mushroom Expert’s entry, and search “lobster mushroom”. It's all true.

Above, the “gnarly” part I mentioned.

Well, we have a lot more to cover here, so yes, I ate them, and yes, they were delicious, I hope I find many more, etc., etc.

Above, a pretty little snake, as yet unidentified. I only have so many field guides. If you know, leave a comment!

A partially skeletonized leaf I found, ravaged by Japanese beetles, I know because I saw them eating other ones (not in the woods).

Shell of Magicicada (left) next to the regular “annual” cicada.

These weren’t out at the same time; I just found their leftover shells. Big long post about Magicicada/13-year Cicadas here.

A fresh little Spiny Puffball, Lycoperdon echinatum.

Below, Gem-studded Puffballs, Lycoperdon perlatum.

Below, the infamous “dog vomit slime” (Fuligo septica)! For real! That’s what it’s really called!

I’ve found a couple references to these “red, blood-like spots from the liquefied breakdown of fungal tissue”, but I don’t know why dog-vomit slime mold does this, and nobody else does. Doesn’t anyone care???

Above, proof of chanterelles. Yes, I rinse my mushrooms (when necessary), because I saw a video of a real live chef trying to figure out once and for all if it mattered if you washed your mushrooms (since most of them have a lot of liquid in them anyway), and he sautéed washed and great un-washed mushrooms at the same time, side by side, and declared that he couldn’t find any difference.

Below, a sprawled-out napping squirrel, July 31, one of the very hot days.

Above, a Pandorus sphinx moth! I became nearly hysterical when I saw this, because I’d seen pictures of Oleander Hawk Moths, and I thought this was one, even though there’s no Oleander around here (except in pots, as annuals), and I thought they lived in Africa and Asia, and I’d decided that Oleander Hawk Moths were the most beautiful moths I’d ever seen. Look them up, you’ll see.

I was saying hello to a pal and we were out by the parking lot and she said “Look at that big green moth on the wall over there.” Just like that. And I didn’t have my camera on me, and I tried using her cell phone but the moth was too high even with a stepladder, and she brought out her real live DSLR camera but the battery was dead, so she gave me a ride home so I could get my camera (I had walked downtown), and I backed my friend’s truck right up to the building so I could stand on it and try to get close enough, and the people inside the store came out and one of them was a guy studying katydids so that was good and he had his camera and we both took some pictures and then I said “Hey, you should try to get him onto your hand and then we can take more pictures maybe closer and it will either get on your hand or fly away but maybe it will fly someplace better” and he tried, and it flew away but it did land someplace better, onto some black metal stairs (closer to where we could reach, at least), so we took more pictures and I was mostly satisfied.

Eumorpha pandorus, click to view large, you can see individual hairs…gorgeous! The colors! The shape of the wings!

Then, a few days later, I came home and at my front door was this:

I had ranted enough to someone about finding this moth that he told someone else about it, and the guy he was talking to said “Hey, there’s a big dead moth in our stockroom” and came out with this. How sweet!

Here’s some honeycomb in a fallen tree in the woods. We couldn't quite figure out why it was all exposed like this, if it was normal, etc. The bees were calm, not like the tree had just fallen over or something…

Above, some mushrooms that I haven’t taken the time to ID yet. It’s right on the tip of my brain…

We found a nice fruiting of oyster mushrooms. Below, after we cut off what we wanted, some ants moved in.

The ants were very interested in whatever they were finding, I think it was the tiny larvae of beetles that were exposed when we cut the mushrooms. That long flat white thing is a gill--picture a regular store-bought mushroom, cut across the cap. This is one of my favorite images.

Some very attractive green acorns. Don’t know what kind.

Below, horrible, horrible seed ticks (and one regular horrible tick), on packing tape, that I got off my pants after a hike. First, I found about 15 on my socks, then I started to look more closely at my other clothing.

If you click on this, to see full-sized, you can barely see that these have only 6 legs, because when they first hatch, that’s how many legs they have. After their first molt, they have 8. Don’t ask me why, I don’t know.

So I left this on the kitchen counter (no, I don’t know why), and the next day I got curious and looked at them with a viewing loupe, and of course they were still alive, and waving their legs around. Why should they be dead? I read somewhere about ticks surviving things like being kept near-freezing for a year--a year--and then being brought to room-temp, and they just pick up like nothing happened. So I folded the sticky sides together, and smunched it all up, like that would fix anything.

Stay tuned, faithful readers, the fall mushroom parade of beauty and edibility will start soon (if I can figure out how to make it rain. Apparently, closing my eyes tightly and wishing very hard isn't how).

Barred owl in my urban backyard

2011-07-31T13:34:00.009-05:00

Funny, just recently I was listing off all the animal friends I’ve seen in my urban backyard (here's the yard), because I discovered a ground hog is living under the shed (don’t tell my landlord! except I think he’s subscribed to this blog…):

ground hog
squirrel
bunny
mole
raccoon
possum
blue jay
dove
white-throated sparrow
tufted titmouse
cardinal
European sparrow
starling
red-bellied woodpecker
downy woodpecker
ruby-throated hummingbird
Carolina wren
robin
brown thrasher
crow
cowbird
garter snake
butterflies X many
cicada
slug
snail
all other insects

So, the blue jays reliably gang up and yell when cats wander through, but when there’s something more sinister they are much louder! Usually it's a hawk that I only see flying off and can't get a good look at, but at 10:00 this morning they were really going at it, at the back of the yard next door, and I went out to see if I could tell a cat to lay off, but I didn’t see anything even though I was only about 10 feet from the blue jays, and then a BARRED OWL took off from right over my head! I mean like FIVE FEET over my head!

Those things are BIG!

I hurried inside and grabbed my camera and he had conveniently relocated to a tree in my back yard. He was maybe 15 feet up.

Sorry about that leaf in his face.

The gang of blue jays were hysterical, and not in the good way. They were perched pretty dang close to the owl, mere feet away, shrieking and screaming and bouncing all over the place. If I was an owl, with exceptional hearing, and those jays were screaming 2 feet away from me, I’d be hard-pressed not to just leave, but he didn't.

When I made tiny squeaky noises, he’d look down right at me. He really didn’t seem too concerned about any of us.

Anyway then one of the blue jays just couldn’t take it anymore, and took a swipe at him:

You can see his nictitating membrane as he reflexively closes his eyes! That’s what made his eye look hazy blue. They have 2 sets of eyelids, the nictitating one moves horizontally. It protects their eyes and they can still see through it. I hear they have voluntary control over them. They close them when feeding their chicks, to protect their eyes from all that beak action. All kinds of animals have them—dogs-cats-polar bears-all birds-camels-aardvarks-most reptiles-amphibians-sharks…one source says that owls close them when flying at high speeds, so their eyes stay moist and clear, so they don’t miss anything. Peregrine falcons blink them repeatedly during their famous 200-mph dives.

It’s also called a “haw”.

(By the way, this was a completely lucky shot. I was using a point-and-shoot, with no tripod, on full zoom, just clicking and clicking…I had no idea)

Well, after that, I guess Owl was finally fed up, and he launched himself off to another tree (only about 15 feet away), and I got THIS awesome shot, which I also didn’t know I was getting until I looked at the pics later. Those feet can tear your face off.

I looked at him some more, and he looked at me some more.

This made my morning.

*Edit: he was there later in the evening, around 6:00, and I called a friend who came and looked too, and she noticed there was a hummingbird having a go at him! Flitting at him, then landing a foot away, buzzing him again, etc.
Hummingbirds are pretty fearless, maybe because the whole world moves in slow motion for them.

Brood XIX—the famous 13-year “Great Southern Brood” Magicicada emergence!

2011-07-04T19:17:00.005-05:00

Yes, yes, it’s a mushroom blog, but I keep finding other great marvels outside too, and I take pictures of it and then I have to post about it! And sometimes it’s just in-between mushrooms.

I’ll stall a little to give you a chance to leave, if you’re not into big close-ups of bug faces and bulging red eyes (especially the very last image) and waving bug legs, and worse, because that’s what’s coming up here. I even heard some “Bleah” and “Ew” from people who aren’t all that squeamish and “love nature”. I got a little squirmy about some of this too. But I did it anyway, even after telling myself not to get all swept up in this crazy Magicicada phenomenon because half the internet was going to be filled with images of emerging cicadas, so why should I make pictures of the same thing? But I couldn’t resist, once I saw it.
It was nuts!

(Last chance—leave now if you’re not into giant bug faces)

So, let us begin.

Mid-Missouri (and many other states) just experienced the emergence of millions of 13-year cicadas. There’s “annual” cicadas and “periodical” cicadas, and the broods are made of periodical cicadas, and Brood XIX is Magicicada with a 13-year life-cycle (there’s 4 in the genus, I don’t know which one we had, could be more than one).

Periodical cicadas have 13- or 17-year lifecycles. The "annual" ones actually have 2-to-7 year cycles, depending on the species (there’s not really a one-year model) but some come out every year. They’re not synchronized, so even though a species may have a 3-year cycle, some come out one year, and another group comes out the next, kind of leap-frogging. The "years" refer to time spent underground as larvae, quietly feeding on sap from tree roots. Broods are named for life-cycle length, and region, and the fact that they’re periodical, and synchronized so they all come out the same year. Brood XIX only comes out every 13 years, and in a particular area. It’s also the biggest brood (numbers-wise), showing up along the east coast to the Midwest, in about 15 states! All at once! Pretty much! Depending on weather and soil temp. I can’t tell you how long it took me to get this straight. I hope I have it right.

I’ve never caught the familiar dog-day cicada molting (well, once, but years ago, and no camera), but there were so many of these (let me stress that—SO MANY) that it was hard to miss. For at least a week, you could just walk outside and see them all over the trees and walls and fences around the house, before they took to the trees and started singing and looking for mates. Pretty much everywhere. I took pictures over several weeks, so some are on fences, and some are on trees, and some are in state parks and some are in my front yard, etc.

Here we go!

Cicadas busting out of their shells (things that make you go “bleah”)

Their best option is to be vertical. After they split their shell (“eclose” from their “exuvium”) they stick out horizontally for a while, with the end/tip of their abdomen still in the shell.

(From above--the camera’s aimed towards the ground)

I like their little orange armpits.

Nobody talks about how their tiny empty feet stay grabbed onto things.

Above, that’s one of my favorites…

They just hang there for a couple hours, doing whatever secret things they do. Their wings start to un-crumple.

What happens next is they wiggle all the way out of their shell and grab onto it (or a tree or whatever) and hang vertically, as their very delicate wings take shape and dry. If they’re not in the right position when they come out of their shells, things don’t go right. Sometimes they can’t get into the right position, sometimes because there’s so many other cicadas in the way, but their sheer numbers (hundreds of thousands per acre) compensate for the ones that don’t make it. I skipped pictures of problems. Big fat “ew”, there.

There’s billions total in this brood, no lie.

They start out pink and tender (just like soft-shelled crabs!) with tomato-red eyes and 2 dark patches.

I wonder if they saw me looming over them in their most vulnerable state and thought, “Oh sh*t oh sh*t oh sh*t”…sorry!

Here’s one (below) in an in-between stage, starting to darken…

Above left, dozens of cicadas and shells on bushes in the backyard
Above right, hundreds on bushes at the edge of the woods

Here’s 5 of them marching along a blooming rose bush, really lush colors all around, fresh cicadas, after a spring morning rain

Let’s see what else we have here--

Fresh cicadas

Mating cicadas!

They lay their eggs in slender branches, near the end, by cutting a series of slits in them, and laying a bunch of eggs in each slit. I didn’t catch them laying eggs, but I did find all kinds of evidence of this. First I saw crazy numbers of branch tips all over the place, which I thought was just an odd result of some recent violent storms. They were everywhere, for weeks. These branch tips had a lot of people scratching their heads! Eventually I understood that the branch ends must have been weakened by the slit-making, making it easy for storms or wind to tear them off the tree.

Above, a torn-off branch. If you click to enlarge you can see many slits along the broken end.

Below, cicada egg-laying slits.

Here’s one with my finger for scale:

Then I got even more curious, and started messing with the branches, and broke one open, and there were the eggs (sorry)!

They look like little grains of rice. They lay 24-28 eggs per slit.

Shortly, the eggs will hatch, the nymphs will burrow into the ground (oh, how I wish I could have found some newly-hatched nymphs!), and spend 13 years underground, sucking sap from roots and not doing much of anything else, as far as I can tell. Occasionally molting as they get bigger. That’s really all.

So, over about 6 weeks, mid-May to the end of June, this whole 13-year cicada thing happened.

Bonus: I noticed that shiny black cars with their brake lights on looked like Magicicadas!

The red light of their eyes goes out when they die:

And this, below, turned out to be my all-time favorite image capture of the whole crazy phenomenon:

I owe a lot to these websites that helped me untangle the facts:
What's that bug?
Cicada Mania
Magicicada

The end!

Morels from April

2011-06-15T10:40:00.009-05:00

Okay, yes, I found morels, it was 2 months ago, that’s how far behind I am because if I don’t post in a timely manner I just keep hiking and taking more pictures and this is what happens.

Everybody who hunts mushrooms and/or takes nature pics and/or has a blog has probably posted about morels, so I'm under a lot of pressure to think of how to make it interesting, but I did capture a few images that I thought were worthy of taking up space on the internet.

Here is the tiniest morel I’ve ever seen:

I went back a few days later, expecting it to have shot up to “beer can” size (apparently that’s an industry standard for describing how big your morel is), but it had hardly budged. So I got curious, having seen many other mushrooms grow at a furious rate in mere days (like they're known for), and I found some things like a pretty bad YouTube time-lapse video of some morels growing (bad because it was really a slide-show, which is cheating, with clever, spinning “fun” shots sprinkled in, and many shots with nothing to compare the size to, and there was goofy music), but appreciated nonetheless because I hadn't taken the time to do that, and I sure didn't know morels take up to a month to get full-sized…

*Edit* Soon after I posted this, one of my faithful followers, the wise and lovely Maxine Stone, kindly took the time to email me this:

"Hi Lisa:
I think this is a Morchella deliciosa. These are small morels and the ridges are more like lines that go up and down as you can see in the pic. They are usually grayish but this one looks old."

So I thought this was just a very, very young Morchella esculenta, but it is, in fact, a different species. These don't ever get "beer-can sized", they top out at about 3". And besides the ridges having more "verticality", for lack of a better word, I would probably notice the stems, which seem to be generally more slender, and less gnarly than the common M. esculenta.

I sure am glad that people who have been at this a lot longer than me are actually reading this blog! Thanks again, Maxine.

Here is the most beautiful morel I found all season:

These are called “greys” on the street but it’s probably a “Classic North American Yellow Morel”, Morchella esculenta (near as I can tell, from this site). I loved how the pits were so dense, making it extra-crinkly, and the luminous moon-color around the dark pits. From what I gather, this would eventually turn blonde-yellow.

Even though this morel almost looks black-and-white, which seems like it would show up easily against new green growth and last year's brown leaves, it was very, very hard to see. Because it was a morel. And they just pop into this dimension when they feel like it. Sometimes it seems like they’re made more of shadows than solid matter.

The beautiful grey again, and a blonde and grey in hand. Same species, I think. Feel free to chime in and set me straight on this if I've got it wrong.

Above, some morels that have offered themselves to me to eat, waiting patiently.

I hiked many, many times this spring, found enough morels to share, and one night fried a whole bunch of them in seasoned breadcrumbs and couldn’t stop eating them as soon as they were cool enough to put in my mouth so they never filled the plate and then I felt a little sick, but I think it was from eating too much, and not me developing a sensitivity to them (which can happen with any food), which would be fine with me because there’s a lot of anxiety around morels, everybody trying like hell to figure out what triggers their arrival and where’s the best place to find them, and all this protocol and etiquette and stories and legends (and sometimes bad feelings), when chanterelles are so plentiful and easy to find and sweet and delicious and can come up for months. But, it’s usually cool and pretty out when you go morel-hunting, and there’s all the other small waking-up forest citizens around, and all is well.

Hissing mushrooms, no lie!

2011-06-07T05:00:00.004-05:00

I don’t know about you, but when I think of mushrooms, I don’t think about what sound they make. So I was thrilled when I captured a delightful video of Urnula craterium hissing quite audibly as they sent out a cloud of spores (after I blew on them). I’ll prepare you as best I can for what you are about to see.

I found out they do this because I wanted to take a picture of one and there were little pieces of leaves and things inside the cup (and springtails, seems like there’s always springtails in them), so I was trying to blow the stuff out of it to clean it up a little. There was about a one-second delay, and then it poofed out a cloud of spores (I’d read about this, but didn’t think it was going to be so obvious!). This tickled me, and I wanted to capture it on video, so I started trying to make them poof out spores. It wasn't until I got home and watched the video that I could hear it. Maybe, when I was in the woods, I thought I was imagining it.

“Devil’s Urn” is one of their common names. It’s a cup fungus. Here’s more (a rotten image, I know—oddly, I do not have dozens of images of these to choose from, like I do every other thing I take a picture of--). When this cup fungus is young and fresh (above), it’s smooth and velvety, a little floppy, and a nice open shape, almost a cocktail glass. These are starting to show their age and curl inward a little. Right about now is when their spores will poof out if you blow on them. And you can hear it.

So, they come out in spring, they’re pretty common, and are considered harbingers of morels, as in, when these are out, morels should be, too.

They’re usually about 2” tall and maybe 1-1/2” across (occasionally a lot bigger, we found a few honkers that were almost 4” across), with a stalk, and they grow on sticks and smallish logs, and even though it can look like they're growing out of the ground, there’s always a stick down there somewhere.

As they age, they start to toughen up and turn brown and get a cool scaly texture on the outside, and the top starts to close up and magically gets a nifty zig-zag edge (faeries with pinking shears).

They don’t poof out many spores when they’re this old. I know, because after I made the first ones do it, I hyperventilated my way all over the forest for days, trying to make other ones do it.

They’re also called “black tulip” fungus.

Now we’re talkin’! That’s some hot crackle-finish zig-zag Urnula action!

But, we need to talk about this audible spore shooting.

Here’s the video, it’s only 5 seconds long; the first sound is me blowing a blast of air on it, and the next sound is the cloud of spores being released.

Mushrooms make noise! Urnula craterium releasing spores--the movie!

I posted this video on Facebook (man, there’s a lot of mushroom people out there!), which generated more comments (64!) than any other image I ever posted, and people with a lot more mycological education than I chimed in with some really great input. My favorite, from Kathie Hodge of Cornell University (there’s a link to her blog on the left), was a link to the Biodiversity Heritage Library, which is digitizing hundreds of thousands of works of “legacy literature” (old research books) from natural history and botanical libraries all over the world, and you can just read them, right there online! And she steered me to a book, Researches on Fungi, by A. H. Reginald Buller, written in 1934, with one chapter titled “Puffing in the Discomycetes” (which are now called “Ascomycetes”—see here), and another titled “The Sound Made by Fungus Guns”!!! First he thinks he heard it, while puttering around in his lab while there was a specimen on the table, then he applies himself like a rat terrier to seeing if he can hear it again, lying next to them in the woods, holding fungi to his ear and finding “…when it puffs one can not only hear the sound of the puffing but also feel the spray from the asci as though the ears were being sprayed with a fine atomiser”. A man after my own heart! It’s really charming reading. But, I think I would draw the line at letting a mushroom spray spores into my ear. I think.

He wrote really great explanations of the mechanics of all this, which I didn’t have the patience to read. Maybe if I had the actual printed matter in my hands I’d read it. I’m just happy to know that some mushrooms make hissing sounds when you blow on them.

To help you calm down after all that excitement, here’s a few more images of Urnula craterium.

(Some of us think the smaller ones in the photo above are a different species, but we can’t get any pros to commit to that)

An older one, with a human thumb for scale.

Much older. Pretty cool how they morph into something so different as they age.

Anyway, I’m just trying to tell you that some mushrooms make noise. Not all mushrooms release their spores in such an extravagant fashion, but these do. I feel lucky to have witnessed it. Now you can, too!

Sprouting acorns—who knew?

2011-05-24T17:12:00.006-05:00

I’ve been stalling on this post for quite a while, wanting to give it special attention, because I was so struck by these. Couldn’t decide which images to use, in what order--real hand-wringing!

I was wandering around in the woods as usual, in mid-April, looking for things (mushrooms, if possible), and I noticed all these RED things on the ground, deep red spots all over the place. At first I just thought it was some leftover pieces of acorns, I don’t know, changing colors like a piece of fading fruit, until I got my face down closer, and found yet another whole new thing going on.

These look innocent enough, except for that startling red…




I don’t know what I thought about how acorns sprouted in the woods, but it certainly wasn’t this! I guess I thought a bunch of nice pale brown acorns fell, most were eaten, and a few sprouted like any other run-of-the-mill seed. What surprised me were the colors (many), and the shapes (as usual). Also, there were a lot of them. Every several inches there was another one! I took precisely one million pictures, then kicked myself later (only a little) for not taking more, and for not spending just a little more time getting better shots…tricky to get everything in focus with shoots up there and acorn down there…

I wonder what those tiny white spots are (above). Nice touch!

Then I started to run into stuff like this:

Okay, here is when I began to realize things were getting a little out of hand. Just what the heck is going on here! Which is the leaf and where is the shoot (and are those sea-slug-like-like ruffles really necessary?) and everything’s all tangled up and wild colors!

The wiggly red things are not the first leaves! They’re connected to the cotyledons (well, they are the cotyledons). The shoot with the first true leaves is between the two flat wiggly things.

Why is everything red?

I actually had to stop and look at this for a while. If that’s the leaf/shoot sticking straight up, then what’s all that other stuff? I had to discuss it with a friend, who helped me untangle the structure.

This one (above) is waving one cotyledon in the air.

As near as I can figure, with acorns (at least this model) everything happens at once. Maybe since it’s got so much food available from the big fat nut meat (and it needs to move fast before someone eats it), it puts out a root and shoot with true leaves at the same time, ready to go, all the while taking sustenance from the big acorn nut (the cotyledon, which is like a placenta, really), so it’s all just *blam!*, get everything going all at once! It’s pretty much like any other seed sprouting, but the cotyledons are extra large, and they seem to not have to leave the shell for everything to work out.

The term “cotyledon” was coined by 17th-century physician Marcello Malphigi (“bad piggy”).

But, the operating words here are “as near as I can figure”. I don’t know any acorn experts yet.

A few more:

See, the shoot is already up, and those red arms are the cotyledons, still in the shell.

Lastly:

Take that, Georgia O’Keeffe! Kids, go ask your parents what that means.

So you walk around thinking you have a basic idea of what’s going on out there, until you look closer. Well, good luck with that! Look where that got me!

More forest offerings, spring 2011 (almost everything up to late April)

2011-05-03T17:13:00.001-05:00

After these there’s still a few more installments coming, of things that deserve their own posts, before I’m current. In the meantime here’s even more of the late leftovers. I can’t help it if there’s so much going on out there!

Here’s this year’s Virginia bluebell buds:

I tell you, I can’t stand it. The buds are this other-worldly opal/purple color, in that great unexpected shape, and then the flowers open very nonchalantly in a completely different color. But it’s the bud shapes that really get me.

Here’s some Goldenseal (Hydrastis canadensis). First time I’ve seen it. Then, of course, I started to see it everywhere.

Oh, and check this out:

Blooming even before the leaves are unfurled!

Here is a Gray Tree frog (Hyla versicolor).

Or it could be Cope’s Gray tree frog, H. chrysoscelis, but you can’t tell them apart in the field (well, their calls are a little different), but H. versicolor has an extra set of chromosomes! So they sometimes call it Tetraploid Tree frog! But never mind that, they can camouflage themselves, like chameleons (but slower)! I’d like to see that, but I think I was pretty lucky to get this close at all.

From a little distance I thought it was a lump of woody polypore or something, on a dead tree. I walked up to see it and it was a frog instead. I actually got this close (this isn’t a zoom shot), through sneaking.
He finally broke, and jumped away, which is when I discovered the yellow on his hind legs:

Yet another thing I had no idea about.

Here’s a tiny little snake I also sneaked up on:

No, I mean tiny, he was barely as thick as a pencil--

He saw me first, and started to go away (made noise in leaves, gave himself away) but then slowed and stopped, so I began my sneaking. I don’t know why he let me get this close.
I don’t know what kind of snake he is. I know from his round pupils that he is not venomous (at least, that rule works in Missouri, barring anything out of the ordinary happening).

Oh, one last thing. I keep finding may apples that have grown through a hole in a dead leaf as they emerge in spring, and they get pretty tall with this leaf stuck around them:

And yes, of course I free them by taking the leaf off, but not before I take a look at this:

Cameras with macro-settings are the best thing in the whole world.

Young Mayapple leaf surprises

2011-05-01T22:49:00.007-05:00

Once again, I am struck by how much I missed in all my earlier days in the forest, before I got completely consumed with macro photography and started to see things differently. "Oh, look, there's a mayapple", I'd say, having what turned out to be a sort of vague vision of them. I had seen the emerging young leaves before, when they were still twisted around the stem like a little rod ("candling"), but I had never noticed that sometimes there is one leaf, and sometimes there are two.

A single "candling" mayapple leaf, cool in and of itself

But the double-leaved ones are pretty awesome:

Podopyllum peltatum, two leaves.

Double-leafed mayapple, with fuzzy leaf edges.


Don't know what to caption this, I am tongue-tied.

Here's a thing I read somewhere: "On plants with a single leaf, the petiole joins the leaf blade in the middle, creating an umbrella-like appearance; on plants with a pair of leaves, the petioles join the leaf blades toward the inner margin of each leaf blah blah blah blah blah." Well, that just says that sometimes there is one leaf and sometimes there are two, sorry. There was more info from the U. of Arkansas Agriculture Extension Service: "During the first several years, the mayapple leaf is round and unbranched, too juvenile to flower. When adulthood is reached, the stem...terminates in a "Y"-shaped fork with two leaves." So it has to do with how old the plant is. Now I know.

There's some other cool stuff about their lives on that site--mayapples don't just germinate, show up in spring and *poof* there's a flower and then fruit...it's a bit more complicated. I'll just say that they can count to four.

Rue anemone, Dutchman's breeches

2011-05-01T22:49:00.003-05:00

Here's more of the backlog of emerging spring flowers.

Thalictrum thalictroides. Last year I saw a lot of Rue anemone leaves, but missed the flowers. Well, now I love the flowers. They're about 1/2" across, and they range in color from white to a luminous pink. They're also called Anemone thalictroides, if anyone asks.
False Rue anemone, which looks very similar, only comes in white, has a more deeply lobed leaf, and has tiny little tooth-like white things on the tips of the leaf lobes ("mucro").

These may not look like much at first glance, but they're pretty good viewed large (click on them).

Found March 31, 2011

Dutchman's breeches (Dicentra cucullaria) get me because their shape is so crazily atypical of what I think when I hear the word "flower". Who would think of such a thing! I would expect these kinds of antics from a tropical orchid, but not a spring woodland flower in the middle of Missouri. Give a kid a crayon and tell them to draw a flower and most of them wouldn't come up with something like this.

The top flower (above) isn't open all the way yet--

Very young flower stalks are all flushed pink like this

I must have taken a million pics of these. And next year I'll probably take a million more.

The leaves are pretty nice too

Toothwort, trillium, Virginia Bluebell

2011-05-01T22:48:00.003-05:00

I had big plans to do a series of posts rounding up some nice spring finds, and publish them over several days, but who am I kidding. I've been on several hikes since the last of these images were taken, and each hike generates more images...

So here's a whole bunch of spring woodland posts, published separately but all on the same day, or I'll never get caught up.

Toothwort--Dentaria laciniata. A purple dragon when this young.

Trillium sessile (this is a pale form of the typical maroon ones)

Virginia bluebell--Mertensia virginica. The young leaves lose this luscious purple color as they develop.

Virgina bluebell, bird's-eye view. Emerging buds visible upper left.

A selection from the forest floor in April.

2011-05-01T22:48:00.001-05:00

Here's some things I found.


Claytonia virginica

Spring beauty (that's its common name, not me trying to write cute). Once again, I seem to favor the buds over the flowers.

A hole.

There were a whole bunch of these right next to the trail in one area. The hole was about the diameter of a pencil. If I had to guess, like, if someone was holding a gun to my head and screaming at me to tell them what I thought made that hole, I'd say, "Worm?" But there's some bees and wasps that do pretty interesting things in the ground. I don't know what made that hole.

Based on those little pellets of soil being there, it's something making a tunnel into the ground, not something emerging from the ground after pupating or whatever.

Viola pubescens var leiocarpa, maybe.

I like violets.

Urnula craterium

A nice devil's urn, showing the scaly outer texture and fancy edges they get when they get older. Word on the street says that when these are out, conditions are right for morels, too.

I hope you like them, because I sure do, so you're going to be seeing a lot more of them.

Erythronium albidum (pretty sure it's not the yellow kind)

An elegant White Trout Lily bud and its two leaves.

Coming soon: sprouting acorns and a mushroom movie!

Winter-spring shells

2011-04-19T01:40:00.002-05:00

I am about 9 hikes behind on posts. Once I started to get out there, when winter let go, I couldn't stop, and the pictures kept building up, and here I am. Now I see I better get on it, as the woods are bursting with everything! There's no going back now. All the spring wildflowers were on cue, we're actually in the second wave of arrivals. So it's post now, or never get caught up.

We'll talk about morels in a few posts. Yes, they're up here, and yes, I (finally) found some. Haven't found the mother-lode or anything, but I'm finding them, and I actually do feel something like electricity when I spot them. Then I eat them.

The following several days I'll be putting up a series of posts covering the last 6 weeks or so, starting the minute I thought there might be signs of life out there.

A snail shell. I just read that there's 106 species of land snails in Missouri, so no ID from me here...named or not, it stood out nicely against the dead leaves, and when I got my face down on it, there was beauty. Looks good big.

An acorn with a perfectly-drilled hole in it. Faeries up to more nonsense. Why would they need to drill a hole in an acorn?

A sloppy little snail, one of the first forest-floor citizens I saw this spring. I was honored.

Extra-fancy striped acorn on a soft bed of spring moss and lichen.

Ever-marvelous Trametes versicolor, Turkey Tail mushroom--this one in an unusual ribbon-like growth pattern. Fresh, supple new growth. A very happy sign even though the day was cool and the sky was dark and low.

Nothing says "spring" like Sarcoscypha dudleyi!

2011-03-13T15:23:00.004-05:00

Scarlet cups are the very first spring fungi to show up here (not including the crazy little ones that try to out-smart winter, and emerge in little protected crevices in fallen logs and then get all jacked-up and frozen), and I am very happy that they are a bright happy scarlet red. They pop out against the carpet of winter fallen leaves.

Sarcoscypha sp.

About 2". There's some old walnut husks next to this one for scale (I didn't put them there--it was probably faeries).

Also, this happened:

Sarcoscypha emerging in woven grass

And here's the whole field, with a happy Sarcoscypha right in the middle of it. Click to view huge so you can see it. They are bright.

Scarlet cup just off center in field

Okay, I was ready to plunk the name Sarcoscypha coccinea on this (from my Audubon Society's field guide) until I read more than one source (hint, hint). Michael Kuo's key says S. coccinea is found in the Pacific Northwest and California, and I am not in either of those places (although I dream of Oregon rainforests, the mecca of mushrooms in the U.S., and I would move there in one minute). So that means that what we find here in Missouri is S. dudleyi, or S. austriaca, and you can't tell them apart except by looking at their spores through a microscope, and as we all know, I don't HAVE a microscope. I'll just call them Sarcoscypha and be done with it.

I've only found these in one spot (well, one more over in this other spot), but this is only my second spring of mushrooms, so they may be all over the place but I haven't found them yet.

Oh, and these puff out spores when you blow on them--seems like there's always little pieces of stuff inside them, and when you blow it out to make them nice for a photo, there's about a 2-second delay and then a wisp of smoke-like spores comes out!

Anyway, now I believe that spring is here. Even if I still have to wear layers. And have the heat on. And can't open the windows yet. But it's here.

Proof of winter

2011-01-20T11:45:00.001-06:00

View from back door

I'm pretty sure I wouldn't find any mushrooms today.
What I really wanted to title this post was, "Kill me now", but I didn't want to attract the wrong kind of attention.

One last Lion’s Mane mushroom, a big one

2010-12-27T20:40:00.016-06:00

A last hurrah of the season, found in mid-November (I say “last hurrah” because all rain stopped in mid-September…the woods here dried up into a crunchy, dead-leaf desert).

Here was my first glimpse of it, me standing right on the trail—I thought, “What is that, a rock?” It was near a bluff, with lots of chunks of chert around. Could have been a rock. But as I got closer, the color became more alive and somehow translucent.

Nov. 13, 2010

I say “right on the trail” in italics, for emphasis, because lots of people hike in this park, and I can’t believe my luck about what I find when I’m just poking along on the trail, not even crashing through the underbrush. People either don’t see stuff, or are disinterested, or say, “Ew, gross”, or I don’t know what. I’m just saying that one does not have to go deep into dark forests to find mushrooms. Because mushrooms are everywhere.

This was the biggest one I’d found this year, growing in a kind of funny low spot so its bottom edges were actually smooshed against the ground (usually they’re higher up a tree. Often maddeningly out of reach).

Below, I’ve thrust my pocket knife into it triumphantly. Regular readers may remember that my open pocket knife is 5-3/8” long, since I use it so often to indicate scale, and constantly mention its size.

Something a little gruesome about that shot (above)

Nothing gruesome about THIS one, though, in my opinion. But, I know what these TASTE like, so to me it is beautiful.

Above, the base, showing the cool moist spongy interior, after I'd cut it off the tree. You can see the knife marks where I sawed away at it. Oh, and to add to the fun, it squeaks when you cut it.

I’d say it was a bit bigger than an average human brain.

I cut it off the tree and it was perfect and I gave half of it to a pal and that still left enough for me to lightly gorge myself on—a big serving, the kind where you know if you eat more, you’ll feel a little stuffed, in a lovely, indulgent sort of way. Man, just looking at that image makes my mouth water, I can smell it, in my mind! Like the freshest chilled scallops and lobster you can imagine.

Helpful hint: whenever I collect these I put them in their own plastic bag (even if I've already got other edibles collected), to keep them as clean as possible, minimizing junk getting caught in the soft hairy spines. The less I have to cut off and discard, the better, because every possible edible morsel of these is worth it.

Common split gill with bonus beetle

2010-12-25T02:06:00.004-06:00

Lookie!

I was poking along in the woods on a chilly mid-November morning, found a stick with a bunch of little white bracket fungi on it, turned it over and found this surprise—a little beetle (Seven-spotted Lady Beetle, Coccinella septempunctata), taking refuge on the underside of a Schizophyllum commune.

When I viewed it full-screen, there was another surprise—there’s actually a tiny bug on the beetle! On the bigger black spot, that little tan thing. Jan. 17 edit: the tiny bug on the beetle is a springtail, a Collembola--those things are everywhere.

Whoo! I love me some Schizophyllum commune.

The big central one is about an inch across.

Those aren’t gills, it is a folded pore surface that looks like gills.

Deer skull articulation investigation

2010-11-14T21:14:00.009-06:00

In late October I went for a hike, even though it hadn’t rained for a solid MONTH. No exciting mushroom activity to speak of, so dry and crunchy out there, but I did find this whole deer skeleton.

I usually snag every skull I find in the woods (shhh, you’re not supposed to take stuff), and carry it home triumphantly, but I left this one. Sick of carrying stuff? Maybe I just have enough deer skulls?

I took some pictures though.

I got fascinated with the wonderful lines created by the sutures (and I just now had to call my anatomy teacher pal to ask her if it was “reticulation” or “articulation”, and she said since it’s a joint, it’s “articulation”). They allow tiny amounts of movement, which makes the skull less vulnerable.

This is the cheekbone, with eye socket that big black curve on the left.

This is a broader view of the one before, showing the whole complicated mess--eye socket, nasal cavities, upper teeth at lower right, etc. Beautiful sculpture.

This is the top of the skull. The lines remind me of the little trails that snail mouths leave as they eat, swinging their heads from side to side. Oh, maybe you’ve never seen that. I had a fish tank next to my bed when I was little (with a pump and everything!), and there was a big snail in it that would eat the algae on the sides of the tank, and make these chew-trails on it that looked very much like the lines in the deer skull.

Finis.

Animal roundup (caution: snakes & spiny caterpillar pictures)

2010-11-02T05:51:00.011-05:00

Here’s some nice creatures I’ve found recently. They are posted in order of Turtle, Very Spiny Caterpillar, and Venomous Snake, in case you want to manage your exposure, if you’re nervous about certain things.

A box turtle, possibly male, wishing I would go away and leave him alone.

Missouri has only two kinds of box turtles, Three-toed or Ornate. As far as I can tell I’ve only found Three-toeds. They invariably suck into their shells when I find them so I can’t count their hind toes (that’s what the “Three-toed” part is referring to). Males usually have nice red or orange irises, but that’s not a fool-proof way to sex them. The Ornate ones have contrasting marks on their carapace and plastron, looks pretty obvious in pictures, but I’ve never found one like that.

I see a turtle just about every single time I go into the woods.

I sure do like the colors on their scales!

Above, Eastern Comma caterpillar.

There’s this great site, Discoverlife.org, where you can check boxes next to features (body color, spines, tufts, etc.), and it will give you choices that match, so you can figure it out. I mean for anything, plant or animal, bug, etc. Great if you don’t have enough field guides, like me. “A portal to all living things”, they say. Can’t beat that!

Here’s his head. At first I was worried that he had some icky fungus problem, because it looked like things were growing out of his eyes, but it turns out that’s normal! Just more spines.
Some caterpillars have venomous spines, which eject venom when brushed up against or broken, so I will pretend that all spiny, hairy caterpillars have this, just to be safe. They won’t kill you, but who needs the pain, itching and heartache.

I wondered why they were called “Commas” (there’s “Question Mark” butterflies, too), and it’s all because of the shape of a little white mark on the underside of their wings. Well, whatever works.

Caterpillars are usually very busy and don’t stand still for you to photograph.

Snake image below! Run!

That’s a BABY Copperhead. Even though she looks 3 feet long in this image, she was only about 14” long. Yeah, they’re venomous, but not THAT venomous, and this one was very small, and she had plenty of room to leave, and she wasn’t in any position to strike, and I had to take her picture. And I’m so glad I did, or I would never have noticed her chartreuse tail tip.

There’s an article in the MDC online that’s trying to tell me that young copperheads use that green tail tip as a caudal lure (like those insane deep-sea fishies that wiggle little things in their open mouths to attract prey—and like alligator snapping turtles)—as in, they sit coiled, with their tail tip sticking out, and wiggle it at lizards and things who think it’s a caterpillar and wander over and are nabbed by the copperhead! And that they lose the green tail color by the time they’re about 2 years old, when they’re big enough to get prey the “regular” way.

I’d love to believe this.

Anyway, here’s her head.

The subtle color shading on those brown hourglass marks on her back remind me of feathers, or butterfly scales. So beautiful. Click on it. The resolution’s not great, though, because I WAS using the zoom (but, I DID lean in, at arm’s length, to about 2 feet away, while keeping up a chattering stream of reasons why it was okay, to my hiking pal who didn’t even want to really look at it—“It’s so small it couldn’t even get a good bite anyway, look, it has plenty of room to get away, they’re not deadly venomous, I’m moving really slowly, it could never bite through my Carhartts”, etc., etc.).

Missouri’s got 5 venomous snakes, and they all have vertical pupils (but not every venomous snake has vertical pupils, so don’t get too full of yourself) because they’re all pit vipers. Please don’t make me go read up on that too. Just know that in Missouri, all the venomous snakes are in the pit viper family and they’ve all got vertical pupils. Unless somebody’s captive exotic venomous snake got loose. Or snakes from other states are migrating here.

I think the combination of their vertical slit pupils, and the way the scales on their heads are arranged, makes them look crabby.

So, in between all the mushrooms, there’s all kinds of other cool stuff out there!

Hericium erinaceus in the same spot as last year

2010-11-01T06:00:00.003-05:00

Even though it's been distressingly DRY here, starting in late September (the absolute worst time for a stretch of no rain to start, in terms of fall mushrooms), they're still out there, in particular the ones that grow on trees (alive or dead). So, since I'm a "there's got to be a pony in here somewhere" type, I went for a hike, to see if, by some wild chance, there was a Lion's Mane growing where we found two (and a waterlogged one in the stream) last year.

There was!

See them, glowing white, right in the middle of the photo above?

About the size of a decent grapefruit. There's a penny balanced on top of the one furthest left (I put it there).

I was there a week earlier, and the smallest one was there, but not the two bigger ones. The little one was maybe 2", and truly no sign at all of the bigger ones. So I was absolutely delighted to find these guys when I came back.

Besides the fact that they taste like lobster or scallops, well, just look at them.
Here, I'll help you.

Parrot Waxy Cap

2010-10-30T22:19:00.001-05:00

Here's a little leftover sweetheart (Hygrocybe psittacina) from an earlier hike (Sept. 26th). It's one of the ones I'd been hoping to find, because, well, they're beautiful, especially when young.

I wasn't at all sure of what these were at first, seeing a troupe of vaguely-orange, small shiny mushrooms, until I poked around a little more and found the just-emerging green ones (below). That color made it pretty unmistakable.

They start out this wonderful parrot-green color (there's another one in the background, the cap was just starting to poke out), then fade to olive-yellow, then orange. They're "decidedly slimy" (to quote Michael Kuo), and get barely 3" tall. This one was about an inch.

How do they push their way out of the soil without getting completely covered with stuff stuck all over them? And what IS that slime, anyway? What's it FOR? Or maybe that's WHY they come out of the soil without stuff stuck all over them--they're so slick nothing can stick. They're not sticky, after all, they're slimy. Big difference. Anyway, that's them, straight out of the camera, in all their charming, parrot-green, slimy splendor.

Oyster mushrooms

2010-10-24T12:15:00.005-05:00

Once you see a young Pleurotus ostreatus, I don't see how you could mistake anything else for these. But you can, and I sure have, because I didn't know what I was looking at, until I'd seen lots of them.

I've only been at this for a year, and I find plenty of mushrooms that at first glance look pretty oystery. Then I see something like the gills aren't running down the stem like they're supposed to, or the gills are too close together or too even and regular, or it doesn't have that lovely faint fish odor, and I am disappointed, but I pick myself up by my hiking boots and move on with my life. There will be more.

I know this because mushrooms are everywhere, EVEN WHEN IT HASN'T RAINED FOR A SOLID MONTH and all the leaves are falling so you can't see hardly anything on the forest floor and when you're hiking with someone and they get a little ahead of you you can't hear a word they say because of the leaf crunching so you have to stop walking and keep yelling "What???" all the time.

But the mushrooms that grow on trees and logs keep going because there's plenty of moisture there. That's nice, because most of my favorites grow on wood anyway.

All that wavy, decurrent-gill goodness...with a light ocean fragrance.

Here's a few more from the same tree:

And here's some tiny tiny TINY baby ones, tucked into an old woodpecker-hole--they were less than 1/4" tall (but, can you even be referred to as "tall" if you're only 1/4"?).

When they're this small they're called "pins" in the growing trade! This growth stage is called "pinning".
Here's a link to a whole bunch more pics of oyster mushrooms I've found: "Oysters"

I love oyster mushrooms. They're pretty abundant around here. I like to just saute a whole bunch of them and eat them straight from the bowl, because I am a ~~pig~~ glutton.

Black Trumpets (finally!)

2010-10-18T15:00:00.021-05:00

Craterellus something--fallax, cornucopioides, lutescens, I don't know which, there's some taxonomy games going on about these. And I don't have a microscope.

I've been dying to find some of these, after reading about how hard they are to find, how intense the flavor becomes when they're dried, how great it tastes to flavor wine with them by dropping a few in the bottle and leaving it overnight, how crazily expensive they are, etc. So much intrigue! I did find a tiny handful of them in the spring, and it all looked pretty discouraging. But then me an' Rob were hiking around recently, and we wanted to go up there to check out that big dead tree, and suddenly they were everywhere. I froze, and yelled "TRUMPETS! Black Trumpets! Oh my gawd, they're everywhere!"

There's at least 20 in the image above. They're about 2" tall.

These are nice and dark because they're nice and wet because it had rained nice and hard the day before, but I'm telling you, these things shift between dimensions or something. You don't see them, and then suddenly you see them. And if they're not conveniently darkened from recent rain, they are EXACTLY the color of a dead leaf:

Here's me, for some perspective:

Anyway, we happily picked them for about an hour, I was thrilled, we got 3-4lbs of them, and oooh, when you've got a whole bunch of them together in a bag, the smell is intoxicating, if you like the smell of sweet, gamy, mushroomy earthy things.

Then a fellow mushroom freak reported finding some over where he hunts, and he picked 9 lbs one day, 7 lbs another day, 11 lbs another day...he said he thought there might be "hundreds of thousands" of them. Incredible.

Then I read some stuff about them, and learned (as much as you can call it "learning" from reading a single blurb on a commercial website) that 12 lbs fresh make one lb dry, which explains something about why they're so pricey. They are very thin-fleshed, it's not like you can really get a good chewy mouthful of them, they're more about flavor (which gets stronger when you dry them). I threw what I thought was kind of a lot (of fresh ones) into a pan (w/ butter of course), and they went "Shp!" and shrunk down to nothing in 2 seconds. Smelled wonderful, though, and what there was of them tasted wonderful. REALLY smelled wonderful.

Then there was no more rain and the whole world dried up.

Stream, hill, leaves, rocks--and worm castings.

2010-10-18T12:00:00.004-05:00

From right: rocks with leaves on them and water with leaves on it and rocks with moss on them and a hill with leaves on it and trees with leaves on them.

I'm sure it was beautiful, even if I couldn't take a decent picture of it because it wasn't 2" away from the camera. There's an awful lot of really beautiful little scenes like this all over the parks that are 10 minutes from where I live.

And then I found this

Worm castings from wild, free-range worms!

They were grey, and on grey rocks, and it looked black-and-white. The lighter ones are drier.

Sycamore bark, worm castings, stone

The texture got me.

Bearded Tooth in my backyard!

2010-10-17T21:30:00.002-05:00

In my back yard!!!

I drove into the little parking area in back, turned off the engine and sort of idly noticed that there was a new section of fence over there, and there it was, a lovely little Hericium erinaceus just sitting there in the tree next to the storage shed. It's an urban area, I tell you! Lots of college students in rented houses. House/driveway/house/driveway neighborhood.

Not a house in the country

That white dot on the tree is it

In my backyard!

About the size of a nice orange.

It was in my back yard! When I saw it, I felt like I just realized I was holding a winning lottery ticket. You may think I exaggerate, but I do not. I wish I understood why I find it such a thrill to find choice edible mushrooms. I can't even think of what to compare it to. I wouldn't necessarily say it's the absolute best feeling I've ever had, but there is something kind of addictive about it. I crave that feeling. Someone should do a study.

You know why I found this in my back yard? I'll tell you why. It's because mushrooms are everywhere, that's why.