Wet Walk at Wilson Mountain
Wilson Mountain Reservation is a protected patch of woods on a stony hill in Dedham. The main entrance has a parking area which is almost always packed with cars full of dog owners taking their pets for a quick ramble up the path, often off-leash. My good friend dedhamoutdoors knows her town well, and took me to the back side of the Reservation, where we didn't see another human or canine soul. Perhaps the persistent light rain helped.
While looking for tell-tale vernal pool creatures, my friend pointed out some springtails!
These are probably Podura aquatica.
They aren't particular to vernal pools, they're actually found throughout the wet parts of the entire northern hemisphere, using their flattened tails to jump along the surface tension of the water.
Springtails are very small six-legged arthropods that split from insects before insects evolved wings.
This apparent skin condition is actually a collection of round mushrooms with the consistency of charcoal. They are probably carbon balls; Daldina concentrica but may be a lookalike in the genus Hypoxylon.
This deflated mushroom is all that remains of delightful creature called " puffball-in-aspic."
The moss was lush and happy with the rain. This picture, and my attempts to identify the organism in it, reminds me that I really need to get better at identifying mosses.
I could stand to get better at lichens, too. These are "rock tripe" but I don't know what species or even if the smooth one and the warty one are different species (probably, I guess).
I did, however, verify with Charley Eiseman that this smooth rock tripe was grazed upon by a mollusk--either a snail or a slug.
These little gray dots are the apothecia--reproductive bodies--of a crustose lichen on a rock.
This dead stick dangled overhead, bearing some wet Exidia recisa mushrooms.
Sadly the only "herp" we found (reptiles and amphibians, which we were specifically looking for) was this decapitated garter snake. It had happened recently enough that the tail was still moving. We guessed that it probably was stepped on by a deer--the most abundantly evident vertebrate in the Reservation.
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These tiny (1-2mm) mushrooms would be nearly invisible if not for their bright golden color.
I've not seen anything quite like them. I suspect they are an early stage of Guepiniopsis, but I'll let you know what the real experts think when they tell me.
EDITED TO ADD: The experts have informed me that I have found a mushroom that I was already familiar with, but was so fresh that it didn't yet look like it does in the field guides. This is one of the witch's butter mushrooms, probably Tremella but maybe Dacrymyces. (You'll notice a lot of hedging on my fungus IDs--this is a kind of wisdom, knowing that I don't know everything, and accepting ambiguity.)
Fun nature walk, thanks Steph!
EDITED to fix dumb html problems--thanks everyone for letting me know!