Oct. 2012 Missouri woodland hike—cinnabar polypore and more.

Hang in there, kids! Trudging forward, hike by hike, getting ever closer to the current luscious spring finds. At least we seem to be moving out of the “everything is brown” phase…

I’ll start with some nice bright colors to get your attention.

This is not lava. It is Pycnoporus cinnabarinus, “cinnabar polypore,” in progress on a dead lichen-covered branch before it emerges into its shelf-like mature form.


Below is another view, the end of the same branch, with some shelving forming.




Above, you can see how it’s infiltrated the wood and turned it this intense bright orange. A small mature fruitbody is lower down.

Below, what you typically see. In the background is the broken branch where I got a special peek at what it does to the interior of dead branches.


Below, the pore surface of the mature shelf. It’s very orange.



And here is the entire underside in all its glory! Let me reiterate for the record that I do not tweak colors! This is the real deal! Put your sunglasses on!



Whew!

There were a few hikes where I kept seeing these little cream-colored lumps on fallen trees and I couldn’t figure out what they were.



But then I saw everything all at once, and all was revealed!



It’s good ol’ Trametes versicolor, turkey tail! Cream-colored lumps not in the frame, but they were on this log!



Fresh growths of T. versicolor can be very beautiful, rich and velvety in quite a range of colors. I sure hope one day I find out what causes the stripes.

Someone’s skull (they are not using it anymore). Maybe a fox.

The articulation is separating from weathering. This might be worth your while to click on to view large.

Mycena leaiana. Always a pleasure to find these little orange lovelies. When they’re really fresh, and just after a rain, they are such a juicy translucent orange they remind me of Tang™.

If you find little orange mushrooms, one way you can tell if it’s these is the edge of the gills are orange, while the rest of the gill is much lighter.

Common name is—wait for it—“orange Mycena”!


Another one of those little Lycoperdon pulcherrimums. I love them.
















Well, that’s that.

September Missouri mushrooms and more, the backlog resumes

If you’re just tuning in, we’re in the middle of a bunch of late posts.

There was a terrible drought and heat wave last summer (2012), I didn't bother hiking at all for nearly 3 months (no precipitation = no mushrooms to speak of), then there was some rain in early fall and some nice fall mushrooms did show up, but I had lost my blogging momentum. Now I’m trying to catch up so I can start posting this year’s spring finds! More pics, less talk!

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Pretty sure the young cream-colored one is Agaricus placomyces. The big wildly-cracked one might be A. placomyces, too, but it's too deteriorated for me to tell. All I know is it's cool.

That’s some ring! The rings on mushroom stems are from a sheet of tissue that used to cover the gills in the developing mushroom (a “partial veil,” they call it). As the cap expands, that sheet of tissue tears away from the edge of the cap, and stays attached to the stem.

I found an area that had a lot of this next stuff--Spongipellis pachyodon. First I found it on this log, and then I found it all over a tree on the other side of the trail.

Here’s how big it was.

Whoa!

This is the non-boring version; apparently it can also be just a toothless crusty patch.

Right across the trail, it was  different again, but the flat teeth, just like on the log version, gave it away. Please hold for teeth.

Pretty great shapes…

At the base of the tree I found very young growths. Here is one eating a leaf.

Just thought I’d toss some color in here, since all the other pics in this post are beige. This was a little mushroom, maybe 2” tall, and I should know what it is as it’s quite common, but I forget. But what about all that fuzz at the base of the stem? That is normal. ***Edit, two years later (10/10/2015): it's Marasmius sullivantii.



I was going for some shots of that reddish stuff which is a favorite slime mold, when this millipede showed up. I didn't realize it was actually a mating pair! They wouldn't stop rolling along on their million legs, and it was quite a dark little corner so I couldn't get a really good shot. But, “Seen millipedes mating: check.”

That bright white ball dead center is a puffball, Lycoperdon pulcherrimum. My shoe for size reference.

An older specimen, spines wearing off.

This seemingly undifferentiated mess on a rock had me stymied for a year. During dry times it was leathery and hardly noticeable. After a good rain, things got weird.

It’s a jelly lichen!

I didn't even know such a thing existed. My knowledge of mosses and lichens is slim to none, so this really didn't compute. Finally I posted it in the right place and some helpful soul piped up and offered some possibilities. It’s either Collema or Leptogium, that much is sure. I started looking both these up trying to
narrow it down and got hopelessly confused, so I quit.



I feel better knowing at least a little something about it.

Lycoperdon pulcherrimum

This is my new best friend. It is a type of puffball.

My excellent hiking-pal found the first one, and then I found a bunch of other ones on another hike. They are tiny (at most an inch--that bit of rusty-brown in the background is an acorn), but the white really stands out (that is, if you’re spending most of your hike looking at the ground 3 feet in front of you).

I think they are so cute that they warrant their own private post. I’ll add more pics to this post if I find more.

9/26: Found more! Still just as cute!