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, “Catch you later if you can come up with some rain" but I could not make it rain. I did manage 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), 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 two “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! *Edit: I'm going with Dekay's Brownsnake (Storeria dekayi), unless someone tells me otherwise. These shy snakes are traditionally only about a foot long. Non-venomous, if you were wondering.



A partially skeletonized leaf I found, ravaged by Japanese beetles, I know because I saw them eating other ones elsewhere.



Shell of the periodical 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. Does no one 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. Anyway dry-sautéing them seems to be the way go with chanterelles, there they are in a pan gently sizzling away with no oil or butter or anything, and suddenly they release a whole bunch of liquid, then you add your fat and finish cooking them. That's just how it is.

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 scales…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…Pluteus. Pluteus cervinus, no doubt. Pink gills, growing on wood.

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 six legs, because when they first hatch, that’s how many legs they have. After their first molt (which is after their first blood meal), they have eight. 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, wishing does not make it so).

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

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--

Storeria dekayi

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.
Its common name is "brown snake." Just "brown snake." Or "Midland brown snake," or "Dekay's brown snake." They don't get much longer than 12", and they eat mostly worms, and slugs, snails and soft-bodied insects. I know from his round pupils that he is not venomous (at least, that rule works in Missouri, barring someone's venomous pet snake having escaped). Here I confess that I did not know until recently that there are several tiny Missouri snakes, just because they're small doesn't mean they're babies.

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.