We now have two more batches of photos in reserve, so I’m feeling complacent (but not happy, which is a rare event!). If you have good wildlife photos, please send them in.
Today’s photos of fungi come from Rik Gern of Austin, Texas. Rik’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.
Here is the first of several batches of pictures of mushrooms taken in northern Wisconsin last September.
The first seven photos are of Mica cap mushrooms (Caprinellus macaceus), so called because the caps appear to be covered with what look like small grains of salt. Like a lot of mushrooms, they grow in clusters on rotting wood. Their soft colors gave the collection a very autumn-like feel.
One of your contributors recently experimented with black and white, and that inspired me to do the same with the last two in the series (photos 6 and 7).
The remaining three pictures are of oddly-shaped fungi. They’re not nearly as common as the mushrooms, but they’re hard not to notice.
The first one is a peeling puffball (Lycoperdon marginatum), and the one that follows is a White coral fungus (Clavulina coralliodes). The puffball must be very young, because the surface turns darker with age and eventually crumbles off, exposing a brown surface. The Peeling puffball and the White coral fungus were both covered with bits of the soil from which they had recently emerged, but I used Photoshop to remove the schmutz and create idealized images of both fungi:
Unfortunately, I could not identify the final image below, but since there are a lot of deer in the area I’m calling it “Antler fungus” until a better name comes along:
From this day forward, Antler Fungus shall be its name.
😁
Thanks Rik. The incredible variety of mushrooms always amazes me. When I saw you were from Austin, I asked myself how can sunny, 100F+ and dry Austin have fungi, but then I saw that you had to travel to Wisconsin for these examples! When I would give talks on teaching chemistry before biology as part of Leon Lederman’s physics first philosophy, I would remind people that I was in school so long ago, that mushrooms were plants.
A very good set! You can put the antler fungus picture into iNaturalist and get a possible ID.
I did that at the time, but I think I was putting things in too fast, because it would jam up and give me the ol’ spinning wheel of glitch. It was actually identifying the wildlife, but not preserving the record of it, so I lost a bunch of information. I used to take pictures from my computer to id things, but that corrupts the data base because it records it as growing where I’m located when I take the picture from my computer and not where I found it.
“I’m feeling complacent (but not happy, which is a rare event!)” Happiness isn’t the normal state of affairs. It’s fleeting and rare.
“Antler fungus” it is! Who am I to disagree?* Nice collection of photographs!
*There’s a song in there: Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) by The Eurythmics.
Lovely photos.
Yes, lovely photos indeed!
Cool photos. I especially like the black and white shots.
Nice set. Thanks.
That last mushroom is commonly called coral or antler mushroom.
clavaiaceae ramaria formosa or stricta probably
By Jove, I think you got it! Thanks, Kathleen.
https://www.first-nature.com/fungi/ramaria-formosa.php
Beautiful photos Rik!