mushrooms | Backyard and Beyond

Posts Tagged 'mushrooms'

Yes, It’s Actually This Orange

Published December 4, 2020 Fieldnotes Leave a Comment
Tags: fungi, mushrooms

This sure jumps out at you, doesn’t it? Orange Peel Fungus (Aleuria aurantia).
A couple of patches had been recorded in Green-Wood by others on iNaturalist and I just had to see it in person. I was not disappointed.

With the library, my main source of books, shut down for months and now hard to get to, I’ve not read a lot of natural history this year. But we have Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures on tap, so stay tuned. (“Merlin Sheldrake”? Surely an alias…)

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It’s Pearl Harbor every day now with COVID deaths, and the criminal moral depravity that is the President plays golf and tweets about TV. We’re almost at 9/ll levels, every single day, and Mitch McConnell, that malignity, sends the Senate home. More people were reported dead on Tuesday from this disease in the US than in all of Japan during all of 2020 (so far), and we still haven’t gotten the full numbers from Thanksgiving weekend.

Mushroom Monday

Published December 24, 2018 Fieldnotes Leave a Comment
Tags: Brooklyn, fungus, mushrooms

First, one is noticed under the pine.Then the others. This stray oak leaf looks gigantic next to them.

John Adams, of all people, forecasting Trump: “the weakness, the folly, the Pride, the Vanity, the Selfishness, the Artifice, the low craft and meaning cunning, the want of Principle, the Avarice the unbounded Ambition, the unfeeling cruelty.” He was speaking of the dangers of aristocracy to republican government, which he felt was liable to be corrupted by the rich and powerful. But he also thought that people would flock to their masters. Here again he gets it on the nose: the suckers “not only become their Dupes, but even love to be Taken in by their Tricks.” That’s the popular support for Trumpism in a rancid nutshell.

Mushroom Monday

Published December 17, 2018 Fieldnotes Leave a Comment
Tags: Brooklyn, fungi, mushrooms

On twigs brought down…and way up.

Mushroom Monday

Published November 12, 2018 Fieldnotes 2 Comments
Tags: Brooklyn, fungi, Green-Wood, mushrooms

These long-format (16:9 aspect ratio) images look better on the big screen, so click on them once to expand.
Usually I shoot 3:2,the old 35mm film standard; sometimes I crop these down for detail. I’m sure you’ll see some 1:1 images around here soon (sounds just right for a woodchuck portrait).Meanwhile, more stinkhorns! This time ~~Phallus impudicus~~ Phallus raveneilii (thanks to comment below, backed up by iNaturalist, for correction.)They — ok, it was her niece — say Darwin’s daughter Etty would edit these out of the garden, for some reason…

Something completely different, although perhaps not completely different:

“As with the societies we live in, the planet we have inherited from our ancestors, and the one we are making now, is a social construct, shaped physically and culturally by the perceptions, values, aspirations, tools, and institutions of societies past and present. These social structures and processes have changed across generations as the cultural practices and institutions that produced them have evolved. In the Anthropocene, Earth’s ecology changes with us. Environmental change is social change, and social change is cultural change.” Erle C. Ellis on a democratic vision of the biosphere.

Mushroom Monday

Published October 29, 2018 Fieldnotes Leave a Comment
Tags: ants, Brooklyn, caterpillars, fungi, Green-Wood, invertebrates, mushrooms

To everything there is a season, and these mushrooms were on the way to deliquescing into ooze. Ants in the first picture. In the second, the white rice-looking things are alive. They are some kind of springtails, possibly of the genus Ceratophysella, and are scavenging on the rich fruit of these fruiting bodies. As always, you can click on these images to pop them open, although you may wish to pass on this one.I read recently a comment from a lower Hudson River valley mushroom hunter, who said this fall has seen the most mushroom in half a century. It was extraordinarily wet, that’s for sure.Large Yellow Webworm caterpillar.

Mushroom Monday

Published October 22, 2018 Fieldnotes 2 Comments
Tags: fungi, Green-Wood, mushrooms

A couple of stinkhorn mushrooms. Elegant, no? Well, elegant stinkhorn (Mutinus elegans) is what these things are called. The French, being French, mince not: Phalle élégant.I usually see these in mulch piles, but these two were sprouting from the grassy mix under a Turkish filbert.Most mushrooms disperse spores via the air. These phallocratic fungi have a fetid mucus which attracts gnats and flies. The spores stick to the insects… I got pretty close for these pictures, but, battling mosquitos, did not notice any stench.

Mammal/Mushroom Combo Monday

Published October 15, 2018 Fieldnotes 1 Comment
Tags: Bronx, Brooklyn, fungi, Green-Wood, mammals, mushrooms

A melanistic variation on the ubiquitous Eastern Grey Squirrel, Sciurus carolinensis. These darker ones are said to tolerate colder weather better. Another notion has it that urban environments, with less predators, are also more likely to see greater numbers of both black and white variations of S. carolinensis. Our first example is digging up a nut or berry, but these squirrels are so successful because they’re practically omnivorous. The leftover-monger with snout in the hazelnut spread is from 2015 in Prospect Park. Besides scavenging our ample waste-food, gathering seeds, nuts, and fruits, and the occasional invertebrate and even vertebrate, they also eat mushrooms. Not sure if the small, tentative bite marks here, however, are squirrel. This mushroom was found in Green-Wood, which interestingly doesn’t have as high a density of squirrels as Prospect Park or the botanical garden in the Bronx (first picture).

Mushroom Heaven

Published October 11, 2018 Fieldnotes 3 Comments
Tags: fungus, mushrooms

There was a lot of rain in September. That made the fruiting bodies of fungi very happy. This one was found like this. I don’t suspect Andy Goldsworthy….Deep under a beech. Very hard to reproduce their (fungi are more closely related to animals than plants) purples, at least as seen by my all-too-human eyes.

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Still enslaved by Facebook’s “surveillance capitalism“?

Bracket

Published January 29, 2018 Fieldnotes Leave a Comment
Tags: Brooklyn, fungus, Green-Wood, mushrooms

Or shelf. Monday’s mushroom, or fruiting fungal body, was growing out of a stump in Green-Wood. The volcanic cone of old wood, all hollowed out inside, was host to several such ‘shrooms: this was the smaller and fresher looking of them.

I know it’s the beginning of the week, but just think of the fungal kingdom surrounding us in the soil and the air. It’s their planet; we’re just maiming it.