Sycamore seed ball surprise, ceramic parchment, false morel, nursery-web spider…April in Missouri woods

Arachnophobes, be warned! There’s a big spider down there!



Xylobolus frustulatus, now that's a name I can really get behind.

This stuff is quite common, but I always sidle on over to it and take a few pics, because I like it. Its common name is “ceramic parchment” (because it’s really hard), it’s a “crust fungus” (because of its form), and I just learned the little separate segments of it are called “frustules.” I know that’s a lot of quotation marks in one sentence, but what can you do.

It is almost always found on well-decayed oak.

*Edit, 2021: I've changed my tune about Gyromitra caroliniana, thanks to some mushroom people who were sick and tired of all the misinformation flying around about the so-called "false morels" and have been putting some effort into trying to get good info out there.

Here’s a red "false" morel. I suppose it’s possible if you were in the grip of morel frenzy you might think this was a true morel, but it's not.

Gyromitra caroliniana

For one thing, if you were to slice this in half, you would see the stem is not 100% hollow, like it is in true morels. It would have chambers and pockets.

I didn’t slice this one in half because there was only the one, and when there’s only one I feel a pang pulling it up just so I can get a better look at it. It was just sitting there, trying to live its little life, and then I come along and rip it out of the ground? Where does it end? I’ll tell you where it ends: it ends when I find a choice edible. Call me a hypocrite. Not much is black and white.

This is not the false morel with exciting toxicity. That one is G. esculenta, and doesn't seem to be found in Missouri. We can't find any evidence that Missouri's G. caroliniana is toxic (although some people are good and sensitive to it, but that's true of many other kinds of mushrooms as well). Look up monomethylhydrazine. The volatile, water-soluble toxin found in G. esculenta can be removed/destroyed by cooking it hard (parboiling it and changing the water several times), but the fumes also contain the toxins, so don’t breathe! So, render G. esculenta edible by boiling it to death, like they do in Europe, where deaths have been recorded from eating it when it wasn't prepared correctly. There was a theory floating around that whatever toxin traces are left after all that boiling and cooking could build up in your liver, and one day there might be your limit, bye-bye!--but how on Earth would they know that's why you died? 

At least, that’s as much as I could glean about it. There’s lots, LOTS of long-term mushroom people who have been eating these for years. I was too scared, but after letting accumulated info actually get into my brain, I now consider G. caroliniana an edible mushroom as safe as a morel (meaning, don't eat it undercooked) and I will try it when I find it. Maybe not every day for weeks, but I'd definitely try a nice well-cooked serving of it.

Not helping: there’s a bunch of different mushroom species called “false morels.”

When I first went crazy for mushrooms, I made some big honkin’ ID mistakes, talking myself into it, saying things like, “Oh, well, maybe this is just a little natural variation in the growth pattern (or color, ecology, season, texture, size…).” The books will tell you the identifying features, and if what you’re looking at doesn’t have them, just keep walking. It doesn't help that the most popular beginner's books can only include X number of species, and then you find one of the less-common related ones and can't figure out what it is. 

You'll figure out which fancier books you need over time. 

The more I learn, the less likely I am to think I got it right—take heed.

Back to more pleasant, less lecture-y things.

Dicentra cucullaria bulblets

I kept coming across these little bundles of pink things, and I couldn't figure out what they were. How do you look that up? Look in a wildflower book index, under “small pink things”? But then, I solved it! Because I found them associated with the rest of itself!


They are corms of Dutchman’s breeches.

Dicentra cucullaria is an ephemeral wildflower. After it makes seeds, the whole above-ground plant disappears until next year. Spring ephemerals get everything done before the trees leaf out and block the sun. I was just never there at the right time before.

Urnula craterium

If you've looked around at all on this blog you might be getting tired of Urnula craterium, but I still like them very much.

I see many of them every spring, on my eager morel forays where I never find enough to scream about, and this spring I suddenly wondered why I only see them as nice open cups. What do they look like before that?

Well, I seem to have an “ask and ye shall receive” charm, at least when I’m traipsing around in the woods, and I found out!

On any other day, I might have thought this was dead man’s fingers (Xylaria polymorpha), but it’s not. It’s an infant Urnula craterium! Guess how I figured it out!

That funny little depression on the top raised my suspicions. Also, it was kind of flexible, not hard and dry like any good dead man’s fingers.

Immature Urnula craterium cut in half

All that whitish stuff is rubbery jelly.


Above, a lovely fern frond, working on waking up.

I figured out what it is, but I’ll have to dig it up and edit later.

*Edit: I think it's actually toothwort and not a fern at all.

Here comes the spider, and then the exciting sycamore seed ball thing! And a simple yet elegant uncommon mushroom, growing a few doors down on the lawn.

I found this nursery-web spider when I was kneeling down trying to get pics of beautiful young Mayapple leaves, and when I was down there, there it was! Perfectly presented! Almost! Had to move carefully so as not to scare it away. I saw it, and actually said, “Whoa!”

Pisaurina mira

Big as my head! Mayapple leaves at this stage are about 3” long, you do the math!

I took a stab at some online keys trying to figure out who this was (Need. More. Field Guides.), but then I remembered my pal is married to a fun entomologist. It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.

These spiders aren't big on webs, as they hunt by waiting to ambush, or actively prowling. But mom carries the egg sac around, and when it’s ready to hatch she makes a protective web nursery, and then hangs around guarding the babies, hence the common name.

I looked at about a million pictures of these, sometimes they have a dark band along their length, couldn't tell if it was an age thing or a sex thing or what.

Okay. Here comes something I thought was so cool I felt like I had won the lottery.

I was happily poking around in the woods, seeing many happy spring events in progress, and I found a sycamore seed ball, just like every other one you've probably seen countless times in your life, and I picked it up for no other reason than just to have something to play with in my hands while I kept walking.

I took a little glance at it, and turned it over, and saw this:

Sprouting sycamore seeds

What??? Did other tiny seeds fall into the fuzzy sycamore ball and opportunistically sprout, or what? What was going on there?


I broke it open, I just had to!


It’s the sycamore seeds themselves, sprouting right there in a big mass! A phenomenon!

I have never seen this, never heard of it, never nothing. Pretty sure this is not how it’s supposed to work. Each seed is attached to a dry fuzzy, and they’re arranged all around a central core, and I’m sure they’re meant to be blown around individually. My best guess is the whole seed ball fell off the tree, and right away got soaked with heavy rain, so the individual seeds never had a chance to dry up and blow away. I found a whole bunch more of these over the next several hikes.


I wonder if I’ll ever see that ever again.

One day this April there was a knock on my door and my neighbor’s lovely daughter told me there were mushrooms on their front lawn, she though I might like to know.


Panaeolus papilionaceus. 
Took me quite a few sessions to finally land on an ID. Little Brown Mushrooms can be difficult to nail down, because there are so many of them. I gave up for a while, then found it by accident while flipping through some mushroom books. One reason I was able to figure it out was because these grow on dung, and I happened to know that last year someone thoughtfully dumped a bunch of cow manure on her lawn.

Also, I asked a famous mushroom person if he thought that's what this was, and he said, and I quote: "I believe so."

Now when I see a brownish mushroom with mottled gills like this, I think "Panaeolus" sooner than I used to. It's a start, anyway.

It was also thoughtful of the mushrooms to make a spore print for me (often the last chance for a positive ID, without a microscope), which is that blackness in the image on the left, above. Another mushroom was growing right above the one in my hand, and dropped its spores on the cap below. Thanks!

A common name is Bell-shaped Mottlegill (see mottled gills, above right), and Glockendüngerling, “little dung bell.” Buncha synonyms: P. campanulatus, P. retirugis, and P. sphinctrinus. Don't ask me.




So handsome with age!

Stay tuned for a little more April, combined with some May.

More Missouri fungi and other spring woodland finds--Polyporus arcularius

Well! It’s turning out to be a good thing I got so far behind in my posts—if I was up to date I would have nothing to post now. It is so dry here I’m not even bothering to hike until we get some good rain. I am frightened.

But here’s a few things from April 2013—when the world was moist…



Polyporus arcularius. According to one source, this mushroom has 31 synonyms! How are we supposed to keep up?



The underside of the cap of this polypore. There is a little smudge just right of center, it’s a Collembola, a springtail. I didn’t see it until this was on my monitor. They’re only about 1/16” long. Springtails are everywhere. One species is the “snow flea” of legend, that is sometimes out on snow on sunny late winter days! I have never seen one of those.

They jump by means of a kind of spring-loaded catapult called a furcula. Springtails are considered indicators of good soil health (not necessarily in your houseplants, though. There can be huge localized populations of them, more than a potted plant can handle).



I had a little side-hobby of confusing these with Polyporus alveolaris because the pore surface is similar. I think I got it now though. These have an obvious stem, and P. alveolaris runs heavy on the orange side.



I peeked inside a dead tree and saw this. Wood rot forms are determined by which kind of rot is working on it (also assorted wood-chewing insects).



These things happen…

I’m not trying to be a tough guy, but I do like bones. Probably gained appreciation of them from an outstanding figure structure drawing class in college. Barry Schactman, wherever you are, thank you for being of the old school!



Gee, those skull sutures look just like a meandering river.



Above, a wet sycamore seed ball, darkened after a nice spring rain. This may seem pretty mundane, but later (in the past) I found something so cool about sycamore seed balls I’m including this as a warm-up.



A tiny wrinkled Hackberry seed pod.

Spring 2013, a few ephemeral Missouri wildflowers

Spring had enough rain (for my purposes, anyway), so it went well. Here begins 2013, still getting caught up, but stick with me, there’s some awesome things coming up in future posts from the past!

Here is some February-March-April, rounding up a few of the usual wildflower suspects, with some surprise extra growing things.


Looks like two different species to me…Missouri has 7 species of trillium.

Need. More. Field guides.

Mertensia virginica (left) and Dicentra cucullaria

Virginia bluebell and Dutchman's breeches, buds and leaves. Not the most compelling image, but I liked how they were right next to each other, and both at around the same bud stage. Perhaps they know each other outside of work.

Dicentra cucullaria buds

Every year now I get carried away with these. I just can’t get over the shape of the buds. If you were to ask most people to describe a flower bud, they would not come up with anything close to this.

They sway in the breeze, and they are tiny, so I have a hard time convincing my point-and-shoot camera to focus on them. Still, they are lovely. They look like watercolors to me.



Their soft feathery leaves are quite nice, too. There is a hint of blue in them.



No idea what that is, above (some kind of bracket polypore), but I know I like the shapes.

Enemion biternatum

That’s false rue anemone. I bet everybody who has a nature blog probably has a picture of those flowers, but I am posting it here to tell you the easy way to tell these apart from real rue anemone. False rue anemone flowers almost always have five petals, and they're mostly white, and how many letters are in the word “false” and "white"? Bam!

Of course there are many other ways to tell them apart when they’re not in bloom, but at least now you have that.


Got mucro?

All those little white dots on the false rue anemone leaf tips are called “mucro.” A mucro is a point on the end of something. Don’t use that word unless referring to something in biology or zoology (or Scrabble).

I wonder what they’re for.


Above are some sweet little bluets, Houstonia caerulea. The whole flower is only about 1/4” across.

I don’t see these every year, I wonder if they’re short-lived and I miss them by not hiking on the right day.

Houstonia caerulea seed pods

Found some seed pods too.

Cladonia! A type of lichen.



I first saw this in February, and two months later it was still there, unchanged as far as I could tell. Lichen is persistent! See text accompanying the jelly lichen for why all I have is the genus for this.