Netted Rhodotus

Rhodotus palmatus

 
You can't make this stuff up.

I should have sent that image to NASA, and said, "I am an amateur astronomer. Look what I found! It was in the north-east sky."

 

These are the nice pink gills

This mushroom was in an impossible spot, at the bottom of a sort of pit of fallen logs all crammed into each other, so for the gill shot I was holding the camera at arm's-length (mine), underneath it, pointing up towards me, and aiming it in the direction I thought it should be, taking the shot and then previewing it, and doing that like 1,307 times in the sweltering heat and it was really getting dark so this is what I suppose one might call a "lucky shot." And who cares about the damn gills anyway, with a cap surface like that.

It's one of my all-time favorite mushrooms.

Quick chanterelle beauty

Young chanterelles and grapevine

This lovely composition was nicely arranged for me before I got there, I guess by faeries (photo from June 28th).

The Humble Cicada

Annual cicada, Tibicen sp.

3 ocelli

 
I've always loved those little sparkly red-jelly eye-spots. When I was little I thought they looked like lights. I still think they look like lights.

What I was really after was a good shot of the beautiful pattern on its back. It's a very elegant color combination, in a lovely and mysterious pattern.

Full frontal cicada.

I had a species name plonked on this one, after looking up "cicada" and then "annual cicada" and then "Missouri annual cicada," until I looked a little further into it, and saw that there's a whole bunch of similar ones, and then I lost interest.