It’s time for me to make my sporadic plea for wildlife photos, as the tank is getting too low for my taste. If you have good ones, please send them my way.
From reader Barbara Wilson we have a bizarre fungus:
There was a dead man’s foot in the garden on campus yesterday. So I photographed it. It is Pisolithus arhizus, a bascidiomycete, a fungus. It produces bundles of spores in a black, gelatinous matrix that can be used for dyes, so it’s also called dyeball. It breaks down to release a mass of brownish spores. The non-fruiting part is a mass of underground, thread-like structures that are mycorrhizal symbionts of conifers and perhaps other plants.
From Reader William Benzon, who took these near Jersey City, New Jersey:
Here’s a wonderful fungus on one of the birch trees: [JAC: this doesn’t look like an oyster mushroom; does anyone know the species?]
Here are some of your beloved ducks. The building in the background at the lower right is One World Center, aka, the Freedom Tower, during construction.
Reader Amy Edmonds sent a cicada that landed on her porch umbrella (I don’t know the species):
Recently while visiting family in Ohio, I found a perfectly intact cicada lying on the ground. It now adorns my windowsill in Maine.
It’s a Birch Polypore (Fomitopsis betulina).
http://www.cicadamania.com/genera/
Lovely photos. I really love the Dead Man’s Foot. Here’s a link to a site that may help you identify that cicada.
Interesting fungus
Beautiful flight photo
Nice pics
Nice entry!
Very nice. But those ducks are Canada Geese…
The chin strap gives ’em away.
Also their proportions are not duck-like. Neck much longer, body fatter, wings longer in proportion to the body.
The cicada look like a dog-day harvestfly, Neotibicen canicularis
Thanks for the nice assortment today.
At first glance (on my iPhone screen) that the dead man’s foot was a tortoise. Very cool all the same.
If this were Britain (which it’s not, I know), I’d provisionally flag this as a “Jews Ear”, relating to the shape and the legend that Judas Iscariot hung himself from a birch tree. Since some of that group are edible, I’d drop it into the tray on a “fungus foray” to get an opinion on it’s identity and edibility. I know that I don’t know enough about fungi.
Actually, come to think of it, next time I do a fungus foray, I’ll take a stove and frying pan.
Cicada looks like Neotibicen tibicen tibicen (Linnaeus, 1758)- Swamp Cicada, Morning Cicada
http://www.cicadamania.com/genera/species.php?q=N.+tibicen+tibicen
The orange fungus and the flying birds (whatever they are) are beautiful.