First up is a fleshy, leafy lichen on a bed of rock and moss. My best guess on an ID would be this is a Felt Lichen – Peltigera polydactylon. I’ve tamed it down some but it’s still a pretty wild guess. My only ‘research’ was looking at far too many photos trying to find a match.

Lichen Wallpaper Large Lichen photos are linked to a 1024 x 768 sized image Lichen Thumbnails are linked to 1680 x 1050 wide screen image The light colored odd shaped growths are another mystery to me. New growth? Reproductive tomfoolery? Mutant terrestrial rock kelp?

Long past their season these Orange Mock Oysters wintered over in fine shape. Wish I had found them in the fall when they were fresh. They might have smelled then. Orange Mock Oysters grow on both hardwood and conifers but the odd thing about them is they don’t smell when growing on conifers. I’ve found them growing on hemlock and couldn’t detect a hint of any odor. Today’s find was on an old dead birch but if they had any odor it was freeze dried out. One other note: they’re supposed to taste worst than they smell.

Orange Mock Oyster – Phyllotopsis nidulans

Mock Oyster Wallpaper – 1024 x 768

The If I don’t use them now I’ll never use them category

Ice Quake

Huge slabs of river ice have cracked and buckled along the shoreline while performing their own version of the plate tectonics shuffle.

The camera can’t catch what the eye sees in this photo.

There’s over a foot of snow on the ground and mushrooms are sprouting in my backyard. Growing on dead Elm trees these mushrooms are February fresh. It takes some mild winter temperatures but with nights still dipping below freezing I’d say they earned their common name, Winter Mushroom.

A single mushroom emerges from a crack in the dead Elm’s bark. The lichen and moss gives you an idea how small this specimen is. Flammulina velutipes caps can grow to 1 -2 inches.

I did a post back in September when Velvet Foot Mushroom was a more appropriate common name. On that post you can see some of the velvety stems.

A few caps were visible in a space between some peeling bark and the tree trunk.

The photo above is linked to a larger size (1024 x 768) for a closer look or to use as a desktop background. The thumbnail image is slightly different and links to an image more suited for a wide screen resolution – 1680 x 1050

Most of the growth is taking place under the bark. This is where they more closely resemble cultivated Flammulina velutipes known as Enoki mushrooms or Enokitake with long thin stems and tiny white caps.

It’s easy to see how this cup fungi gets the common name Eyelash Cup when you get a closeup look at these tiny mushrooms. Dark hairs on the cup’s edge look like eyelashes. Their habit of growing in groups and orange color makes them stand out.

Scutellinia scutellata

A macro view revels the hairs that look like eyelashes. Eyelash cups seem to like cooler temperatures, I find them regularly in the spring and fall.

The trees have dropped most of their leaves and hunting mushrooms has gotten a lot harder. Anything on the forest floor is now pretty much buried and even if a mushroom is ‘visible’ they’re well camouflaged by the colors of the fallen leaves.

Brushing away the leaves revels some mushrooms growing under the litter.

I haven’t tried too hard to identify these. It just gets too frustrating. If you have a clue I’m willing to listen.

Another but not as well hidden group of mushrooms.

Again the identity is anybody’s guess, I’m not going to bang my head trying to name them.

I figured it wasn’t a bad day at all. I actually knew half of the mushrooms I found. The Pear Shaped Puffball photo didn’t come out well enough to use so you won’t see it here.