Nature Post!
Very sunny today... a nice break after nearly two weeks of rain (and more rain predicted for the rest of this week). I took a very long walk, because I had a feeling that after all the rain there should be mushrooms for me to find... and there were, but I did have to look for them. I have a few secret spots that always provide me with beautiful mushrooms to look at (actually, there isn't anything secret about them except nobody else wants to look at the mushrooms), and today one of them decided to yield up some pretty things for me. However, most of the pretty things had been mostly eaten... the other thing that likes wet weather besides mushrooms is slugs, and slugs also like mushrooms. A lot. Sigh.
Milkweed getting ready to flower... I expect these will be open in just a day or so. When I was a kid these milkweed plants would have been almost guaranteed to yield up a couple of monarch butterfly caterpillars per plant... but I haven't seen any for quite a while. Monarchs undergo a complicated migration, and while as a species they're not endangered, their long migration route and the need for proper environments along the way puts individual populations at risk. The populations from where I live migrate all the way from the Great Lakes to Mexico... which is an incredibly long flight for a butterfly, except it's not individual butterflies that make the trip. When the weather starts to get cooler and the food plants are starting to fade out, Monarchs start flying south. Once they are safely out of the range of frost (the mid-southern USA rarely gets hard freezes) they will stop and lay some eggs there, then continue. They may spend four or five generations in their winter homes in Florida and Mexico, breeding and hanging around, but when the weather gets too hot, their required food plants can't tolerate the heat, so they start heading north again. Many of that generation will end up somewhere in the southern USA and lay another batch of eggs, while the previous season's halfway batch has already hatched and is heading north. Running into pesticides, absense of milkweed, or other issues can seriously damage a population, since they require multiple stable and suitable areas along their trip.
Pickerelweed, as I discovered last season when I started fearing that the extremely invasive water hyacinth had found its way to my lake. To my relief, this is a relative of that troublemaker, but a common native one that provides excellent protection for small fish and other tiny aquatic organisms with its dense underwater tangle. I've never seen it growing in much more than a foot of water, and it seems to like bodies of water that, like my lake, don't have drastic changes in water level. It protects shorelines from erosion with its dense, creeping roots and is a desirable resident.
Mushrooms of the Russula genus are very common, widely distributed, and probably the most easily located mushrooms, although they are not easy to identify down to a species and it's generally not worth the effort. With a worldwide distribution, they're well-known to mushroom-lookers almost everywhere. Like many other mushrooms, they are ectomycorrhizal, which means they interact with but don't penetrate tree roots and usually have a symbiotic relationship with them.
Tiger swallowtails are very common in the eastern USA. They will lay their eggs on anything in the rose family, which includes many flowers and shrubs, and they will also make use of just about any kind of fruit tree you can possibly think of. The adults feed on nectar, such as these pretty purple flowers...
These pretty purple flowers are also extremely popular among honeybees. While I was taking pictures, I tried to get a few honeybee pictures because they're pretty, but the bees are VERY busy at the moment, and after I had disturbed them enough a few of them started to bump into and bounce off me. In bee language, this is a polite suggestions that you go elsewhere, so I took it. Almost all bees will bump you several times in warning before stinging. Most wasps and hornets are not so considerate.
The flower itself, while it's pretty and extremely common, is apparently not very popular among humans in general. I grew up knowing it as "some kind of thistle" or "little thistles". It has many common names and most of them are not flattering. A native of Europe and Asia, it's not even popular in places where it belongs, much less in the places it doesn't, which include large parts of South America, most of North America, Australia, New Zealand, and other locations. Its common name in the USA is Canada thistle, which is foolish as it isn't any more native to Canada than to here. It also goes by "creeping thistle", "corn thistle", "creeping thistle", "cursed thistle" and "lettuce from hell thistle" (I AM NOT KIDDING LOOK IT UP). Its scientific name is Cirsium arvense, and the "creeping" part of its name (and its unpopularity) comes from its tendency to form massive and nearly indestructible clusters of spiky leaves and four-foot stalks from a rootstock that can spread nearly twenty feet in any direction from the nearest single plant. They are considered a pest or worse by farmers everywhere they are found and they are nearly impossible to kill unless you are willing to mow them down every time they come up. It is, of course, in the aster family... if you see anything with lots of petals that isn't a clover or something of that sort, it's probably an aster.
As an interesting side note, while some plants of this genus are considered medicinal, and the roots are often edible, they are generally not very popular as a food product because they make you fart terribly. Not kidding.
I didn't mean to uproot this mushroom... I was trying to poke around the base to see if it had an underground "cup" structure that helps to identify Amanita species. The other thing that helps identify them is a prominent ring around the stem, but not everything with a ring around the stem is a poisonous mushroom... most mushrooms develop inside a protective structure and the ring is just a remnant of that covering.
I love my beautiful lake.
A nice-looking little May apple fruit. It's the fruit that earns it the name "May apple", except that, like most common names, this is rather stupid, since the PLANTS come up in May but the "apples" don't show up till mid-June.
For reference, these are actual crab apples. They won't get less green but they will get bigger... it's easy to see how the May apple fruit got its name, considering how closely it resembles these despite being only very distant relations. For reference, playing baseball with a metal bat and a large barrel of over-ripe crab apples is entertaining, but not productive, and there is no need for anyone to play in the outfield, as if you successfully hit the apple there will be very little of it left.
Probably "milk mushrooms", a relative of Russala and another common, not-poisonous-but-also-not-edible mushroom.
This very bright patch of orange could be one of the large group of fungi known as rusts, but most of those are plant pathogens, and this is growing on dead wood, so it's probably something else. As far as what it actually is, your guess is as good as mine.
These wood decay mushrooms are odd in that they continue to curl up until the cap has almost vanished and the gills are completely exposed, looking more like a flower than a mushroom.
This is an older version of the same mushroom. I have now spent over an hour trying to identify it with absolutely no luck at all, which is extremely annoying for such a distinctive fungus. Grrr.
A little ecosystem in miniature... the moss, first of all, is putting up its own little stalks with little spore-bearing caps on the end (top middle of picture). In addition, this moss creates an ideal habitat for not one but two types of mushrooms I only find growing on this moss, the litlte brown ones and the more distinctive orange-red ones with the tiny caps. I expect that the long stems are to make sure the spores clear the moss and don't end up stuck in it. Moss is good at holding onto moisture and that might be what makes it a good habitat for these mushrooms... mosses are not responsible for decay, but the fungi may be feeding off decaying parts of the moss or stuff that is rotting in the moisture underneath.
I found several of these little orange-yellow mushrooms but they had been eaten beyond the possibility of identification. They could be young jack o' lantern mushrooms, an orange fungus that occasionally fools people into thinking it is a chanterelle, but all the specimens I found were so mushy and full of holes it was impossible to tell what they might have originally looked like.
These young boletes (I think they're boletes... I can't see whether they have gills or pores but I often find big boletes later in the season with these yellow stems and velvety red caps. These ones barely made it out of the ground before the slugs got to them.
Another half-eaten mushroom and most likely another Russala or a relative. It is always interesting to see when the cap has been eaten away to expose the gills, as it's a view you would normally only get by taking the mushroom and cutting it up. There appeared to be some very small ants working on this one.
Turkey tail fungus on a stump. This is exclusively a decayer of already-dead trees, usually on the ground, but it's not terribly picky and will grow on dead standing trees too, although it seems to like wood that is already fairly rotten. It comes in some fantastic and gorgeous colors and patterns. It also does a very cool thing with the wood it grows on... if it is a very hard wood that can stand up to the fungal digestion, it will create patterns in the wood which are called "spalting". This is a discoloration of the wood caused by different strains of fungus... either different species or incompatible mating strains of the same species. The incompatible strains create barriers between themselves, leaving dark lines in the wood. Wood that has been "spalted" but is still hard enough to craft with is quite valuable; you can look it up on Google to see some of the beautiful products. If you want to see the work of this specific fungi and its relatives, specify "zone line spalting", as there are other kinds.
This is probably smoky polypore or something similar. It is a very common decayer of standing dead wood or fallen branches. Some trees end up with massive coatings of them like this. Trees with this kind of fungus growth are inevitably already dead... at this point, the hyphae inside the wood have consumed or blocked all of the living cells that once transported water and nutrients through the tree.
Not many things harder to photograph than a spiderweb in midair.
Three years ago I started photographing this exact polypore. It was a little white blob and I was annoyed with it for not being a slime mold. Three years later, it has grown into a proper shelf... and the tree it is growing on, which was alive and well when I discovered it, is now completely dead. It's evidence of how sneaky a fungus can be, working inside the wood, invisible but deadly. Once it's advanced to the point where fruiting bodies are appearing on the surface, the tree's lifespan is probably measured in just a few years, especially if it's a fairly young tree.
On a side note, there are decay fungi that specialize in the constantly damp area where the tree meets the leaf cover and the soil. Fungi that decay this particular area are called "butt rot". That is their proper title. Butt rot is a serious issue for tree professionals. But it is also a reason to say "butt rot" with a straight face.
Big, evil slugs consuming what was a very pretty coral fungus. Stupid slugs. I find very little redeeming about them. Actually, I find nothing redeeming about them. I dislike them immensely.
And on that note, I shall conclude this post... which has taken me about three hours while I tried to look things up... and get on with failing at biostatistics.
Goodnight!
.
.
.
Milkweed getting ready to flower... I expect these will be open in just a day or so. When I was a kid these milkweed plants would have been almost guaranteed to yield up a couple of monarch butterfly caterpillars per plant... but I haven't seen any for quite a while. Monarchs undergo a complicated migration, and while as a species they're not endangered, their long migration route and the need for proper environments along the way puts individual populations at risk. The populations from where I live migrate all the way from the Great Lakes to Mexico... which is an incredibly long flight for a butterfly, except it's not individual butterflies that make the trip. When the weather starts to get cooler and the food plants are starting to fade out, Monarchs start flying south. Once they are safely out of the range of frost (the mid-southern USA rarely gets hard freezes) they will stop and lay some eggs there, then continue. They may spend four or five generations in their winter homes in Florida and Mexico, breeding and hanging around, but when the weather gets too hot, their required food plants can't tolerate the heat, so they start heading north again. Many of that generation will end up somewhere in the southern USA and lay another batch of eggs, while the previous season's halfway batch has already hatched and is heading north. Running into pesticides, absense of milkweed, or other issues can seriously damage a population, since they require multiple stable and suitable areas along their trip.
Pickerelweed, as I discovered last season when I started fearing that the extremely invasive water hyacinth had found its way to my lake. To my relief, this is a relative of that troublemaker, but a common native one that provides excellent protection for small fish and other tiny aquatic organisms with its dense underwater tangle. I've never seen it growing in much more than a foot of water, and it seems to like bodies of water that, like my lake, don't have drastic changes in water level. It protects shorelines from erosion with its dense, creeping roots and is a desirable resident.
Mushrooms of the Russula genus are very common, widely distributed, and probably the most easily located mushrooms, although they are not easy to identify down to a species and it's generally not worth the effort. With a worldwide distribution, they're well-known to mushroom-lookers almost everywhere. Like many other mushrooms, they are ectomycorrhizal, which means they interact with but don't penetrate tree roots and usually have a symbiotic relationship with them.
Tiger swallowtails are very common in the eastern USA. They will lay their eggs on anything in the rose family, which includes many flowers and shrubs, and they will also make use of just about any kind of fruit tree you can possibly think of. The adults feed on nectar, such as these pretty purple flowers...
These pretty purple flowers are also extremely popular among honeybees. While I was taking pictures, I tried to get a few honeybee pictures because they're pretty, but the bees are VERY busy at the moment, and after I had disturbed them enough a few of them started to bump into and bounce off me. In bee language, this is a polite suggestions that you go elsewhere, so I took it. Almost all bees will bump you several times in warning before stinging. Most wasps and hornets are not so considerate.
The flower itself, while it's pretty and extremely common, is apparently not very popular among humans in general. I grew up knowing it as "some kind of thistle" or "little thistles". It has many common names and most of them are not flattering. A native of Europe and Asia, it's not even popular in places where it belongs, much less in the places it doesn't, which include large parts of South America, most of North America, Australia, New Zealand, and other locations. Its common name in the USA is Canada thistle, which is foolish as it isn't any more native to Canada than to here. It also goes by "creeping thistle", "corn thistle", "creeping thistle", "cursed thistle" and "lettuce from hell thistle" (I AM NOT KIDDING LOOK IT UP). Its scientific name is Cirsium arvense, and the "creeping" part of its name (and its unpopularity) comes from its tendency to form massive and nearly indestructible clusters of spiky leaves and four-foot stalks from a rootstock that can spread nearly twenty feet in any direction from the nearest single plant. They are considered a pest or worse by farmers everywhere they are found and they are nearly impossible to kill unless you are willing to mow them down every time they come up. It is, of course, in the aster family... if you see anything with lots of petals that isn't a clover or something of that sort, it's probably an aster.
As an interesting side note, while some plants of this genus are considered medicinal, and the roots are often edible, they are generally not very popular as a food product because they make you fart terribly. Not kidding.
I didn't mean to uproot this mushroom... I was trying to poke around the base to see if it had an underground "cup" structure that helps to identify Amanita species. The other thing that helps identify them is a prominent ring around the stem, but not everything with a ring around the stem is a poisonous mushroom... most mushrooms develop inside a protective structure and the ring is just a remnant of that covering.
I love my beautiful lake.
A nice-looking little May apple fruit. It's the fruit that earns it the name "May apple", except that, like most common names, this is rather stupid, since the PLANTS come up in May but the "apples" don't show up till mid-June.
For reference, these are actual crab apples. They won't get less green but they will get bigger... it's easy to see how the May apple fruit got its name, considering how closely it resembles these despite being only very distant relations. For reference, playing baseball with a metal bat and a large barrel of over-ripe crab apples is entertaining, but not productive, and there is no need for anyone to play in the outfield, as if you successfully hit the apple there will be very little of it left.
Probably "milk mushrooms", a relative of Russala and another common, not-poisonous-but-also-not-edible mushroom.
This very bright patch of orange could be one of the large group of fungi known as rusts, but most of those are plant pathogens, and this is growing on dead wood, so it's probably something else. As far as what it actually is, your guess is as good as mine.
These wood decay mushrooms are odd in that they continue to curl up until the cap has almost vanished and the gills are completely exposed, looking more like a flower than a mushroom.
This is an older version of the same mushroom. I have now spent over an hour trying to identify it with absolutely no luck at all, which is extremely annoying for such a distinctive fungus. Grrr.
A little ecosystem in miniature... the moss, first of all, is putting up its own little stalks with little spore-bearing caps on the end (top middle of picture). In addition, this moss creates an ideal habitat for not one but two types of mushrooms I only find growing on this moss, the litlte brown ones and the more distinctive orange-red ones with the tiny caps. I expect that the long stems are to make sure the spores clear the moss and don't end up stuck in it. Moss is good at holding onto moisture and that might be what makes it a good habitat for these mushrooms... mosses are not responsible for decay, but the fungi may be feeding off decaying parts of the moss or stuff that is rotting in the moisture underneath.
I found several of these little orange-yellow mushrooms but they had been eaten beyond the possibility of identification. They could be young jack o' lantern mushrooms, an orange fungus that occasionally fools people into thinking it is a chanterelle, but all the specimens I found were so mushy and full of holes it was impossible to tell what they might have originally looked like.
These young boletes (I think they're boletes... I can't see whether they have gills or pores but I often find big boletes later in the season with these yellow stems and velvety red caps. These ones barely made it out of the ground before the slugs got to them.
Another half-eaten mushroom and most likely another Russala or a relative. It is always interesting to see when the cap has been eaten away to expose the gills, as it's a view you would normally only get by taking the mushroom and cutting it up. There appeared to be some very small ants working on this one.
Turkey tail fungus on a stump. This is exclusively a decayer of already-dead trees, usually on the ground, but it's not terribly picky and will grow on dead standing trees too, although it seems to like wood that is already fairly rotten. It comes in some fantastic and gorgeous colors and patterns. It also does a very cool thing with the wood it grows on... if it is a very hard wood that can stand up to the fungal digestion, it will create patterns in the wood which are called "spalting". This is a discoloration of the wood caused by different strains of fungus... either different species or incompatible mating strains of the same species. The incompatible strains create barriers between themselves, leaving dark lines in the wood. Wood that has been "spalted" but is still hard enough to craft with is quite valuable; you can look it up on Google to see some of the beautiful products. If you want to see the work of this specific fungi and its relatives, specify "zone line spalting", as there are other kinds.
This is probably smoky polypore or something similar. It is a very common decayer of standing dead wood or fallen branches. Some trees end up with massive coatings of them like this. Trees with this kind of fungus growth are inevitably already dead... at this point, the hyphae inside the wood have consumed or blocked all of the living cells that once transported water and nutrients through the tree.
Not many things harder to photograph than a spiderweb in midair.
Three years ago I started photographing this exact polypore. It was a little white blob and I was annoyed with it for not being a slime mold. Three years later, it has grown into a proper shelf... and the tree it is growing on, which was alive and well when I discovered it, is now completely dead. It's evidence of how sneaky a fungus can be, working inside the wood, invisible but deadly. Once it's advanced to the point where fruiting bodies are appearing on the surface, the tree's lifespan is probably measured in just a few years, especially if it's a fairly young tree.
On a side note, there are decay fungi that specialize in the constantly damp area where the tree meets the leaf cover and the soil. Fungi that decay this particular area are called "butt rot". That is their proper title. Butt rot is a serious issue for tree professionals. But it is also a reason to say "butt rot" with a straight face.
Big, evil slugs consuming what was a very pretty coral fungus. Stupid slugs. I find very little redeeming about them. Actually, I find nothing redeeming about them. I dislike them immensely.
And on that note, I shall conclude this post... which has taken me about three hours while I tried to look things up... and get on with failing at biostatistics.
Goodnight!
.
.
.