Sycamore seed ball surprise, ceramic parchment, false morel, nursery-web spider…April in Missouri woods

Arachnophobes, be warned! There’s a big spider down there!



Xylobolus frustulatus, now that's a name I can really get behind.

This stuff is quite common, but I always sidle on over to it and take a few pics, because I like it. Its common name is “ceramic parchment” (because it’s really hard), it’s a “crust fungus” (because of its form), and I just learned the little separate segments of it are called “frustules.” I know that’s a lot of quotation marks in one sentence, but what can you do.

It is almost always found on well-decayed oak.

*Edit, 2021: I've changed my tune about Gyromitra caroliniana, thanks to some mushroom people who were sick and tired of all the misinformation flying around about the so-called "false morels" and have been putting some effort into trying to get good info out there.

Here’s a red "false" morel. I suppose it’s possible if you were in the grip of morel frenzy you might think this was a true morel, but it's not.

Gyromitra caroliniana

For one thing, if you were to slice this in half, you would see the stem is not 100% hollow, like it is in true morels. It would have chambers and pockets.

I didn’t slice this one in half because there was only the one, and when there’s only one I feel a pang pulling it up just so I can get a better look at it. It was just sitting there, trying to live its little life, and then I come along and rip it out of the ground? Where does it end? I’ll tell you where it ends: it ends when I find a choice edible. Call me a hypocrite. Not much is black and white.

This is not the false morel with exciting toxicity. That one is G. esculenta, and doesn't seem to be found in Missouri. We can't find any evidence that Missouri's G. caroliniana is toxic (although some people are good and sensitive to it, but that's true of many other kinds of mushrooms as well). Look up monomethylhydrazine. The volatile, water-soluble toxin found in G. esculenta can be removed/destroyed by cooking it hard (parboiling it and changing the water several times), but the fumes also contain the toxins, so don’t breathe! So, render G. esculenta edible by boiling it to death, like they do in Europe, where deaths have been recorded from eating it when it wasn't prepared correctly. There was a theory floating around that whatever toxin traces are left after all that boiling and cooking could build up in your liver, and one day there might be your limit, bye-bye!--but how on Earth would they know that's why you died? 

At least, that’s as much as I could glean about it. There’s lots, LOTS of long-term mushroom people who have been eating these for years. I was too scared, but after letting accumulated info actually get into my brain, I now consider G. caroliniana an edible mushroom as safe as a morel (meaning, don't eat it undercooked) and I will try it when I find it. Maybe not every day for weeks, but I'd definitely try a nice well-cooked serving of it.

Not helping: there’s a bunch of different mushroom species called “false morels.”

When I first went crazy for mushrooms, I made some big honkin’ ID mistakes, talking myself into it, saying things like, “Oh, well, maybe this is just a little natural variation in the growth pattern (or color, ecology, season, texture, size…).” The books will tell you the identifying features, and if what you’re looking at doesn’t have them, just keep walking. It doesn't help that the most popular beginner's books can only include X number of species, and then you find one of the less-common related ones and can't figure out what it is. 

You'll figure out which fancier books you need over time. 

The more I learn, the less likely I am to think I got it right—take heed.

Back to more pleasant, less lecture-y things.

Dicentra cucullaria bulblets

I kept coming across these little bundles of pink things, and I couldn't figure out what they were. How do you look that up? Look in a wildflower book index, under “small pink things”? But then, I solved it! Because I found them associated with the rest of itself!


They are corms of Dutchman’s breeches.

Dicentra cucullaria is an ephemeral wildflower. After it makes seeds, the whole above-ground plant disappears until next year. Spring ephemerals get everything done before the trees leaf out and block the sun. I was just never there at the right time before.

Urnula craterium

If you've looked around at all on this blog you might be getting tired of Urnula craterium, but I still like them very much.

I see many of them every spring, on my eager morel forays where I never find enough to scream about, and this spring I suddenly wondered why I only see them as nice open cups. What do they look like before that?

Well, I seem to have an “ask and ye shall receive” charm, at least when I’m traipsing around in the woods, and I found out!

On any other day, I might have thought this was dead man’s fingers (Xylaria polymorpha), but it’s not. It’s an infant Urnula craterium! Guess how I figured it out!

That funny little depression on the top raised my suspicions. Also, it was kind of flexible, not hard and dry like any good dead man’s fingers.

Immature Urnula craterium cut in half

All that whitish stuff is rubbery jelly.


Above, a lovely fern frond, working on waking up.

I figured out what it is, but I’ll have to dig it up and edit later.

*Edit: I think it's actually toothwort and not a fern at all.

Here comes the spider, and then the exciting sycamore seed ball thing! And a simple yet elegant uncommon mushroom, growing a few doors down on the lawn.

I found this nursery-web spider when I was kneeling down trying to get pics of beautiful young Mayapple leaves, and when I was down there, there it was! Perfectly presented! Almost! Had to move carefully so as not to scare it away. I saw it, and actually said, “Whoa!”

Pisaurina mira

Big as my head! Mayapple leaves at this stage are about 3” long, you do the math!

I took a stab at some online keys trying to figure out who this was (Need. More. Field Guides.), but then I remembered my pal is married to a fun entomologist. It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.

These spiders aren't big on webs, as they hunt by waiting to ambush, or actively prowling. But mom carries the egg sac around, and when it’s ready to hatch she makes a protective web nursery, and then hangs around guarding the babies, hence the common name.

I looked at about a million pictures of these, sometimes they have a dark band along their length, couldn't tell if it was an age thing or a sex thing or what.

Okay. Here comes something I thought was so cool I felt like I had won the lottery.

I was happily poking around in the woods, seeing many happy spring events in progress, and I found a sycamore seed ball, just like every other one you've probably seen countless times in your life, and I picked it up for no other reason than just to have something to play with in my hands while I kept walking.

I took a little glance at it, and turned it over, and saw this:

Sprouting sycamore seeds

What??? Did other tiny seeds fall into the fuzzy sycamore ball and opportunistically sprout, or what? What was going on there?


I broke it open, I just had to!


It’s the sycamore seeds themselves, sprouting right there in a big mass! A phenomenon!

I have never seen this, never heard of it, never nothing. Pretty sure this is not how it’s supposed to work. Each seed is attached to a dry fuzzy, and they’re arranged all around a central core, and I’m sure they’re meant to be blown around individually. My best guess is the whole seed ball fell off the tree, and right away got soaked with heavy rain, so the individual seeds never had a chance to dry up and blow away. I found a whole bunch more of these over the next several hikes.


I wonder if I’ll ever see that ever again.

One day this April there was a knock on my door and my neighbor’s lovely daughter told me there were mushrooms on their front lawn, she though I might like to know.


Panaeolus papilionaceus. 
Took me quite a few sessions to finally land on an ID. Little Brown Mushrooms can be difficult to nail down, because there are so many of them. I gave up for a while, then found it by accident while flipping through some mushroom books. One reason I was able to figure it out was because these grow on dung, and I happened to know that last year someone thoughtfully dumped a bunch of cow manure on her lawn.

Also, I asked a famous mushroom person if he thought that's what this was, and he said, and I quote: "I believe so."

Now when I see a brownish mushroom with mottled gills like this, I think "Panaeolus" sooner than I used to. It's a start, anyway.

It was also thoughtful of the mushrooms to make a spore print for me (often the last chance for a positive ID, without a microscope), which is that blackness in the image on the left, above. Another mushroom was growing right above the one in my hand, and dropped its spores on the cap below. Thanks!

A common name is Bell-shaped Mottlegill (see mottled gills, above right), and Glockendüngerling, “little dung bell.” Buncha synonyms: P. campanulatus, P. retirugis, and P. sphinctrinus. Don't ask me.




So handsome with age!

Stay tuned for a little more April, combined with some May.

Hissing mushrooms, no lie!

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 (below) 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.

I posted this video on Facebook (man, there’s a lot of mushroom people out there), which generated more comments (64!) than any other thing 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, and I finally got a real live mycologist to confirm it--probably Pseudoplectania.)





With a human thumb for scale.



I've never seen any mention of these taking on the same color as the surface of the wood they're growing on, but it seems to happen fairly consistently.

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!

A selection from the forest floor in April.

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!

Black cup fungi

Pseudoplectania or Plectania or what?, originally uploaded by Mycologista.

Everybody assumed these were Devil's Urn (Urnula craterium) except they're not growing in the right place, among some other features that didn't line up. U. craterium grows on smallish sticks. I found lots of these, all jammed up tight against the base of Eastern Red Cedars. They're also much smaller than devil's urns, biggest only about 1/2" across.

To be fair, the big one in the center (above) with the nice fringed edge probably IS a standard devil's urn. But all the little ones behind, not.

Michael Kuo himself, the rock star of mushroom book authors (his books are hugely useful and highly entertaining), has offered to take a closer look at them. His website, www.mushroomexpert.com, is the go-to site for mycophiles.

I'll eventually get around to sending some dried specimens to him. The poor guy, he's swamped with "What's THIS?" e-mails, including from me. Well, you makes your bed, you sleeps in it.

*Update: I've passed this around and a few actual mushroom people agree that it's probably Plectania. Or Pseudoplectania. Not much info out there on these for us amateurs.


It's really a great book. Too bad I don't actually OWN it.
*Edit sometime in fall, 2011: I own it now! I am proud and happy!