Mid-October 2012 fall mushrooms backlog--hen of the woods, red russulas and more

Keep it moving! Keep it moving! Almost through the post-drought 2012 logjam!

***Heads up, snake-o-phobes! There is a little snake further down the page, and I am holding it. 

I’ve been smooshing two or more hikes into a single post or everything will get completely out of hand.



Do you see that nice Grifola frondosa at the base of that tree?



Might not look like much but they are one of my favorites.

This is a little demitasse hen, compared to how big they can get.

Do you see that nice Hericium erinaceus on that log? Dead center.



Might look like some kind of shaggy mess, but they are one of my favorites.

This one is also a little on the small side, and not at optimum pure white sweetness. Pretty sure I took the big one and trimmed yellow off. Not a perfect workaround, but I bet I ate it happily.

An aged Lycoperdon pyriforme, pear-shaped puffball. The hole is where spores come out.

Lovely red Russulas amongst the leaves.



They are quite common in the woods here, but I like them every single time. They can be so red!

This is turning into The Summer of No Specific Epithets! Science is overtaking the field guides and it’s turning out that many fungi we amateurs (read: “me”) were slapping a complete Latin name on (with some confidence) are actually not what we thought they were, indistinguishable from similar species without a microscope or DNA tests, or it turns out they were named after similar specimens from other countries, and the N.A. ones are genetically distinct. So I would probably have called this Russula emetica, but now I really can’t say what species it is. There are many red Russulas. It’s a red Russula.



It is beautiful. End of discussion.

Here comes the snake--I posted it small so the snake-fearers can bleep past it. Click to view large.

It’s the best of a bad lot of pics, it was dusk and way too dark for normal camera function! Had to use some “low light” setting (the flash pics were hideous) and resolution suffered. But I have to include it, because I’d been wanting to find one of these for at least two years, when I first learned of them, and I was so excited! It’s a rough green snake, Opheodrys aestivus.

They’re not uncommon but you never see them because they are exactly the color of leaves. They hang around in bushes on the edges of woods. I saw it and thought it was a shoelace or a croakie or something!

It was so slender, about the thickness of a pencil, but easily two feet long! I was afraid of holding it too tightly so I’m trying to just barely hang on with that awkward hand position. See its tail looped twice around my arm? I actually had a little trouble convincing it to get off me.

They are benign and eat crickets and other insects and hunt exclusively by sight. I very much hope to see one again. And not that I hope to see this, but they fade to blue when they die.



Above: Spongipellus unicolor, the one Michael Kuo calls “a big, doinky doofus”.



They grow on oaks (mostly). They’re parasitic. That’s about all I could rustle up on them.

Tremella foliacea, which I thought was just an extra-frilly wood ear (Auricularia auricula) for quite a while. But these are much thinner, and grow in clusters like this.

I was here.

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.

More September mushroom fun after the drought broke--heavy on Flammulina velutipes.

I’ll keep plowing away at these older images because wait’ll you see the current spring stuff! But this older stuff must have its day.


Sept. 2012, found these Flammulina velutipes peeking out from behind a big slab of loose bark on a dead tree. Being a big dumb lurching human, I had to investigate, so I pulled the bark away.

I’m glad I did. Every stage of growth there, like a kind of fine botanical illustration (as always, click to view bigger!).




Above, hey, don’t some of those look a lot like those enoki mushrooms sold in grocery stores? Well, that’s because they are. They’re the same mushroom. The same. (***Edit, 11 years later: seems DNA sequencing has shown the cultivated Asian species is Flammulina filiformis, oops! But now we know.) When grown in cultivation they are grown in very low light, and in a “carbon dioxide-rich” environment, and instead of developing a black stem of decent thickness and a lovely, sticky, tawny-orange cap, they stay creamy white and grow very, very tall and slender, with a tiny little runty cap. Here, under the bark, it is dark with low air circulation, but are you trying to tell me as soon as it reached the edge it was going to morph into the typical form, below? I don’t know what’s going on anymore.

Here’s a prime example of wild ones on a tree, outside (they like it cold, by the way), with normal levels of CO2 (you can also see how they got their common name, “velvet foot”):



I have absolutely no idea why high CO2 would affect their growth like it does.
Below, a close-up of the very young growths from under the bark, the caps are just little smears! These were about an inch long.



Sure is a lot going on out there that we hardly ever see.

Below, pear-shaped puffballs, Lycoperdon pyriforme. I mostly cannot resist taking pics of these whenever I see them. One way to keep track of these, compared to other small, whitish puffballs, is these always grow on wood.



Below, no idea what kind of mushroom, but photogenic in my book.



Below, a nifty example of a partial veil, the thing that makes the ring on the stem. As the cap expands it will tear away from the outer edge and leave that circle of tissue attached to the stem.



I went around and around about the ID of this one and finally mostly landed on Agaricus placomyces, but not 100%. That bit of yellow on the edge of the cap helped with diagnosis—it bruised that color after I touched it--but there were other things that would have narrowed it down further, which I missed. One guy asked me how it smelled, because A. placomyces is supposed to smell terrible. I didn’t smell it. But since then I’ve made a real point of sniffing everything.



I see a box turtle just about every time I hike.

I’m always trying to get a look at their hind feet, so I can count their toes and see if it’s a Three-toed or Ornate, and they almost always suck into their shells so I can’t see their hind feet at all. Here, a front foot will have to do. Very nice claws!



Since then I’ve learned there are other ways to tell those two kinds apart but I still want to see those hind toes.


Above, in one of the state parks 10 minutes from where I live.