This is the penultimate of the two batches I have, so why not get your wildlife photos together instead of snoozing after that big Christmas feast? Today we have the final installment of Holiday Mushroom photos by reader Rik Gern from Austin, Texas. Rik’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

Here is the final batch of mushroom pictures taken in northern Wisconsin last September.

I saved this batch for last and am a bit chagrined to send them because most of these pictures are of species I was unable to identify. I’ve been using iNaturalist, but it jammed up a few times. It would seem to identify the genus and species, but then I would get the infamous spinning wheel, which would persist until I exited the application. I thought it was recording the data, but later discovered that it wasn’t. I hope you will be willing to let your more knowledgeable readers weigh in on the species identification. [JAC: yes, please, if you know the species, do weigh in]

The cap on this mushroom has a woody look. This was the only example I ran across.

This one has nice, delicate looking gills. I think it might be a Destroying Angel  (Amanita bisporigera), but the pictures I saw showed some kind of flap on the stem which this specimen lacks.

Whatever this is, the small cap looks like a cookie dusted with cinnamon.

Something sure found this mushroom tasty!

This mushroom is in an intense tug of war with a thick spider web!

You can see from this image that the web is layered in three sheets.

I’ve see time lapse films of orb weavers weaving their webs, but I can’t imagine how this web was constructed.

Mushrooms are so often associated with psychedelia that I couldn’t resist closing this series by playing with a closeup image of the pores on the underside of the Chicken fat mushroom (Suillus americanus) to give it a trippy psychedelic feel.

Just as an interest in Photoshop led to an interest in photography, the thrill of having pictures on whyevolutionistrue alongside those of learned naturalists and scholars has piqued my interest in learning more about the world of fungi. I’ve been asking friends to recommend books that give a broad overview of fungi. Guide books only make my eyes glaze over and tie my brain in knots, as I don’t seem to have a good mind for that kind of detail, but I can grok the big picture when it’s presented well. There’s a book coming out in May called The Complete Fungi: Evolution, Diversity and Ecology by David S. Hibbit that looks fantastic. I have pre-ordered it, and thought some of your readers might be interested as well, so here is a link.

Today, courtesy of Rik Gern, we once again enter the mysterious world of fungi. Rik’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

Here is the second batch of photos of Pinewood gingertail (Xeromphalina campanella) mushrooms from Wisconsin’s northwoods.  I tried to focus on portraits of individual mushrooms in this series.

This picture of the gills on the underside of the cap was taken using natural light.

The following two shots utilized a flash. (3-4) I like how they reveal more detail, and the flash sure makes the exposure easier, but something about the lighting doesn’t feel quite right.

This picture was a lot harder to process, but the natural light made it more satisfying:

The last several pictures are all of the same cluster of mushrooms. There was something about this grouping that seemed majestic and it was fun to try to give each shot a different feel:

We’re down to one contributor (fortunately, Rik Gern, who sent today’s photos has several submissions), but I’d appreciate your good wildlife photos if you have them. Thanks!

As I said, Rik Gern, from Austin Texas, sent some photos, and they’re of fungi. Rik’s captions and IDs are below, and you can enlarge the pictures by clicking on them.

Here is a collection of four mushroom species found in Wisconsin’s north woods last September, as identified by iNaturalist.

Our first specimen is an Earthy powdercap (Cystoderma amianthinum). The environment in which I found it was in accordance with Wikipedia’s description (“damp mossy grassland, in coniferous forest clearings”), but an image search made me dubious. Perhaps some well informed readers can weigh in. Whatever its true identity, it was plentiful in mossy clearings.

Next we have three photos of the Funeral bell (Galerina marginata). The name provides a not-so-subtle clue that the mushroom is highly poisonous and should not be consumed.

I love the coloring on the cap of the Fragile brittlegill (Russula fragilis):

The last mushroom in this set, Fly agaric (Amanita muscaria, four photos) is a classic storybook/fairytale mushroom! It’s supposed to have psychotropic effects once you boil away the toxins, but I’ll leave it to the more dedicated cosmic cowboys to test that hypothesis. Judging from the pictures on Wikipedia, I’d guess that his one is the subspecies flavivolvata, known as American fly agaric:

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: