Missouri woods—backlog—gorgeous edible mushrooms* I

*This is not a mushroom ID blog! Please use many resources when identifying mushrooms.

After a nice 2012 morel-hunting season (but almost 2 months earlier than normal—!), a severe drought started here in central Missouri. Spring started out fine, but then it stopped raining, in MARCH. I lost my hiking/blogging momentum.

There was a nice rain about 2 months in, and I headed out all hopeful, but 15 minutes into it crashed into not one, but two horrific, enormous clouds of seed ticks—mission aborted.

We’ve had some rain recently, and I’ve been getting out there (still slim pickins), but why did I never post this stuff from last fall? So, here comes everything, in a few separate posts, in roughly chronological order. From last fall.



Above and below, gorgeous young chicken of the woods, mid-September. Saturated with rain, so the color is even brighter.


I swear the color is not tweaked. They really can be so bright it almost hurts your eyes.

Below, more Laetiporus sulphureus, but older specimens, and not wet from recent rain.

The pale grey horizontal stroke in the background is the trail in a very popular park! We harvested a lot of this, and left some, and later were swapping foray stories and found out that a friend of ours got what we left. “Oh, that was you guys? Thanks for leaving me some!”

I like them this young:


Chicken of the woods turns butter bright yellow:


Oh, man, if you’ve ever eaten these I know you’re in a reverie just looking at this! But wait ‘til you see the next one! Vegans, don’t look, you’ll hurt yourself!


Sautéed chicken of the woods on rib eye with gorgonzola and asparagus. That was a great day.

A few September Missouri plants

More untimely yet chronological posts!


A hike to The Place of Great Moss almost always delivers. Any time after some rain, except in the very hottest months, this one area just glows with soft bright green mosses and silvery lichen.

Lichens are composite organisms of a fungus and an alga or two. They’ve plunked lichen in the fungal kingdom. I have no beef with that.

(Also, I didn’t put that leaf there. I just showed up.)

Special scratch-n-sniff image!

I hope you can feel the soft and moist in this photo, and if you (lightly!) scratch your screen you should be able to smell it—soft air, wet leaves, and damp earth and green. It’s just beautiful! I don’t know why there’s such a big swath of moss growing here…nothing else on this bluff in either direction looks much different…maybe some mysterious mineral deposit makes for prime conditions for this luscious moss neighborhood?

There are many different kinds of moss growing here. I’ve got my hands full with mushrooms, so unless I stumble upon their ID (see below), they’re just “moss.” Nothing personal.

Next is a tiny beauty that I actually revisited with my tripod. Looking down on the whole plant, it was ornate soft sparkles, which I simply could not capture. The texture of the flower heads made them stand out in organized patches, but the colors were too subtle for my camera to differentiate enough to show. Or, it could have been my own ineptitude. I tried! I swore a little!

Still, there was a lot going on in each flower head. Very tiny white-to-pink 4-petaled flowers, maybe 1/16”, and 3-lobed seed pods forming right next to them, green with blushes of rich red.

Euphorbia dentata, “toothed spurge.”  Please view large.

Above, toothed spurge seedpods.



TINY flowers.

It's considered a "noxious weed" by the USDA, so that's pretty bad. Another source points out its milky latex, which can cause blisters and dermatitis, and don't get it in your eyes! Yet another says it has 5-lobed flowers, which it clearly does not, and my dumb little "Weeds," a Golden Guide, casually throws out that "All have numerous clusters of tiny male and female flowers that lack both sepals and petals." I dunno, those sure look like petals to me...

I confess I had shrugged and walked away, regarding finding a name for this one. There’s a lot of weedy-looking, small, common native plants that don’t get featured in most field guides. My only “weed” guide is my little 4 x 6 Golden Guide. The only reason I was able to identify this was because there happened to be a photo of it in the March issue of Missouri Conservationist!

I’ll keep trying to get a satisfying overall shot of this one. I thought it was a captivating little plant. Don't tell the Feds!

September fungi—a few uncommon polypores--Spongipellis unicolor, Berkeley's polypore, Antrodia heteromorpha?

I found a few things that were visually appealing, but mystifying when it came to ID.

This small pale blob (about an inch across) was intriguing, with its lumpy network of holes, but I could not find anything remotely like it in any of my books or online. I wasn’t even sure it was a fungus! Could have been an egg-case, maybe. The problem, as it turned out, was this was a very young growth stage of this fungus—but thanks to the magic of the internet, I posted the image on you-know-where, tagged it with the names of the authors of some of the best mushroom books, and somebody ID’d it definitively in minutes (Gary Lincoff himself!). Then I plugged in the name, and got somewhere!

                                             

                                       Antrodia heteromorpha?

*Edit: over the years I've found unmistakable Abortiporus biennis which was the ID suggested to me, but I always had a nagging feeling that it didn't fit this one. Since then I found some other options, so far Antrodia heteromorpha seems like the best fit. In any case, many thanks, Gary Lincoff! Your years of experience are (sadly, now "were") a true treasure. He probably had so many ID requests thrown at him that he got confused. 

Next on the menu is another peculiar polypore which also stumped me.


                         Spongipellis unicolor

I confess that when I see most bracket-like tree fungi I often roll my eyes and keep walking, mainly because I have a lot of trouble with them—to me, they tend to blur together, and I can’t keep track of which is which. Never seen these before, though, and they were quite distinctive. Had to pull out the big guns and pester the pros again.



Looks like some kind of bread or cake! Or, as Michael Kuo so eloquently puts it, “…kind of a big, doinky doofus…” among polypores. That must be why it got my attention! He also says “…it is not often mentioned in field guides (perhaps because it's too much of a doofus?).” The above specimen is about 5” from top to bottom. They grow on oaks, mostly. They’re parasitic.

Below is a nice swirling Berkeley’s polypore, Bondarzewia berkeleyi. It was a good 16” across. And there were three of them. These are not uncommon (and they come up in the same spot for years), and I didn’t have to send telegrams to experts for this one (partly due to an ID mishap when I found one before. Now I know!).


                                             Bondarzewia berkeleyi

Just a pretty fungus swirl on the forest floor.