Showing posts with label black cup fungi. Show all posts
Showing posts with label black cup fungi. Show all posts

Sunday, May 1, 2011

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!

Wednesday, May 5, 2010

Black cup fungi

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.

Book cover for '100 Edible Mushrooms'
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!