Fall Fungi

Though there are mushrooms known as “winter mushrooms” we’ve had a few nights of freezing temperatures now so I think our mushroom hunting season is over. What you’ll find in this post are all the mushrooms I’ve found since the last mushroom post I did in September. Mushrooms can be both interesting and beautiful, and by the end of this post I hope you’ll agree. Hen of the woods (Grifola frondosa,) shown in the above photo, is an edible polypore that often grows in the same spot year after year. I usually find them at the base of very old oak trees. They are called the “dancing mushrooms” in Japan. That’s something my imagination won’t let me see, but I can see the back of a brown hen’s ruffled feathers, and that’s how they come by their common name in this country. They are also called ram’s head or sheep’s head.

Lion’s mane, bear’s head, monkey head, icicle mushroom-call it what you will, Hericium americanum is a toothed fungus that is always fun to find in the woods. Soft spines hang from branches that reach out from a thick central stalk, making it look like a fungal waterfall. They can get quite large and I thik the biggest one I’ve seen was about the size of a grapefruit. Every one I’ve seen has been growing on a log or a dead tree as this one was. Though it was slightly past its prime I thought it was still pretty. This mushroom is edible but unless you can be 100% sure of your identification you should never eat a wild mushroom.

Carnation earth fan (Thelephora terrestris) is also called the common fiber vase. It is a small, tough, inedible fungus that grows on soil. It is said to like sandy soil under pine trees and that’s just where I found it. It is also said to have a moldy, earth like scent, which I didn’t smell. It does look like a carnation. I like its deep reddish-brown color and frosted white edges. It has a cousin called the stinking earth fan (Thelephora palmata) but it looks quite different.

I found quite a large colony of common ink caps (Coprinopsis atramentaria) on a lawn at work, and it was a good thing I found them when I did because the cap margins were starting to roll up.

Once the cap starts rolling like this, this mushroom doesn’t have a lot of future left. Common inkcaps are said to be edible, but they become toxic if consumed with alcohol. For that reason they are known as “tippler’s bane.” They create a strong sensitivity to alcohol by inhibiting the liver’s ability to break it down. You don’t die but you do get very sick.

Inkcaps release their spores by a process called autodigestion, dissolving into an inky liquid which contains their spores. The black, spore rich liquid that this mushroom becomes was once used as ink for printing. They come and go quickly; I’ve seen them disappear in just a day.

White worm coral fungus (Clavaria fragilis) is one of the club fungi, and is also called fairy fingers. Each fruiting body is tubular and unbranched, and they usually grow in clusters like those seen in the photo. I found these very clean examples at the edge of a swamp. They’re fragile so if you want a photo of them complete it’s best not to touch them.

Cockscomb coral mushrooms (Clavulina cristata) are ghostly while and, like many coral mushrooms, seem to prefer growing in hard packed earth like that found on woodland trails, and they often grow in large groups. It’s startling to see something so pure white come out of the dark soil.

The deceiver (Laccaria laccata) gets its common name from the way it resembles many other small mushrooms. When young like these in the photo were they can appear reddish, pinkish brown, or orange. As they age, they can change enough to even appear white or sometimes nearly colorless.  

The rather deep gills of the deceiver are a mixture of long and short. Though when young these gills are dark colored, they lighten as they age and get covered by this mushroom’s white spores. They are said to be edible but with their ability to mimic other mushrooms and a name like the deceiver I’m not sure I’d eat them.

Every time I do a mushroom post I have photos of mushrooms I can’t identify, and this is one of those. I’m adding this shot to this post because they’re a pretty color and fun to look at, and you don’t need to know a name to be able to see their beauty.

In case you’re searching for a name for that mushroom in the previous photos, here are its gills.

I found a big cluster of red painted suillus mushrooms (Suillus spraguei) in a lawn. It is also called the painted slippery cap and red and yellow suillus. The caps are dark red when young like I think these examples were, and develop yellowish cracks as they age. They also have mats of reddish hairs on the cap but it had just rained so they were hard to see.

The real surprise was the hairs on the underside of the cap. They looked like spun sugar, but are really the remnants of a partial veil that once covered the spore bearing surface. Along with the marbled stem and yellowish elongated pores, they made this mushroom very pretty. It does indeed look like it has been painted.

A young thin maze, flat polypore (Daedaleopsis confragosa) might fool you into thinking it was a turkey tail fungus, but one look at its underside would tell you otherwise.

On a turkey tail fungus the underside is full of round pores that look like pin holes, but the lower spore bearing surface of the thin maze polypore is maze like, as its name suggests. Michael Kuo of Mushroom Expert. com says that this mushroom’s appearance is highly variable, with pores sometimes appearing elongated and sometimes rounder. With mushrooms it’s always about increasing the surface area that its spores grow on so it can produce more spores, so I’m guessing this one produces an amazing number of them. These polypores grow on fallen branches and logs.

Usually, if you say the word “polypore” to someone who knows mushrooms they think of a mushroom with pores on the underside of the cap but as we saw with the thin maze flat polypore, they don’t always have pores. In fact, sometimes they have gills, like the rusty gilled polypore (Gloeophyllum sepiarium) seen here. I found them growing on an old timber at work and that made sense, because their job is to decompose dead wood like white pine, which our forests are full of.  It’s a velvety, colorful mushroom that often grows into a lozenge shape like that seen in the above photo.

And here is what the gills on a rusty gilled polypore look like. There are always unexpected surprises in nature.

The velvet footed pax (Tapinella atrotomentosa) is a large bracket type fungus that grows on conifer stumps and logs. Though it is considered to be a bolete it has gills, so it’s easy to get confused when you find it. The most interesting thing about it is how it contains several compounds that repel insects, so it is unlikley that you’ll find any fungus gnats on it. All those insect repellants will also make you sick, so it’s best to let it be. It looked like an animal ran its claws over the cap of this example but I didn’t see any insect damage. The depressed center and rolled rim help with identification, so I think I have this one correct. It matches several examples I’ve seen online.

The real clincher for indentification on the velvet footed pax is its velvet foot. Black to brown velvety hairs cover the base of the stem (stipe.) One of the things that bother me about this one is how the outer rim isn’t rolled under quite as much as I’ve seen on a few other examples.

Pear shaped puffballs (Lycoperdon pyriforme) grow in clusters on stumps and logs but I’ve also seen them growing on a rotted part of a living standing tree, and that is never good for the tree. Their common name comes from their kind of upside-down pear shape. As they age pores open in the top of each one so its spores can be released. This one is fairly common but I see it more after it has released its spores than before.

I’ve seen a lot of yellow spindle coral fungi (Clavulinopsis fusiformis) but I’ve never seen them do this. These fungi usually grow in tight clusters often in the hard packed soil on the side of the trail, but I’ve found them on the forest floor as well. I’m not sure why they would have entwined like that.

Surprise webcaps (Cortinarius semisanguineus) appear in early fall under pines, and the pine cone in this photo shows where these grew. They are also called red gilled fibercaps because of the fine fibers that grow on the orangey brown caps.

The semisanguineus part of the scientific name means “half blood-red,” which is a reference to the bright, blood red gill color, and this is what the “surprise” in the common name also refers to. Though my color finding software sees “Indian Red” I think this color would pass.

This group of yellow mushrooms, so tiny I couldn’t see enough features to help in identification, have to take the prize for smallness in this post. The penny shows you just how small they were.  

I think this (parasol) mushroom has to take the prize for simple beauty. I’ve had a bear of a time trying to identify it though, and even though I started trying a month ago, I still don’t know its name. But not knowing a name isn’t always a bad thing. In fact, it can be a good thing. As Henry David Thoreau said: I begin to see an object when I cease to understand it.

Of course the prize for the most colorful mushroom in any mushroom post has to go to the turkey tails (Trametes versicolor) with their bands of vivid color. Just after the leaves fall but before it snows is the perfect time to find them, and I’ve been seeing a lot of them. I hope you’ll have a chance to see them in person as well.

Nature makes nothing incomplete and nothing in vain. Aristotle

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Things I’ve Seen

This is something I’ve never seen before; the Ashuelot River is so low that it has stopped falling over the dam on West Street in Keene. I’ve known this section of river all my life. I used to fish here at the dam when I was a boy and they still fish for trout, pickerel and sunfish here today. This dam is known as the Faulkner and Colony dam because it was built around 1777 by that company to power their woolen mill. A few years ago there was talk about removing it to open up the river and another idea would refurbish it to generate power but I haven’t heard anything lately about either idea. I like the thought of restoring the river to what it once was without any dams on it. Two other dams have been removed in the past 20 years; one in Swanzey and one in Hinsdale. They were timber crib dams though; this one is granite block.

When gravel bars like these appear in the river it shows low the water really is. It’s amazing how quickly plants will take over these islands.

Though we haven’t had any rain we’ve had several cool nights and cool air over warm water always means mist, as this shot of Half Moon Pond in Hancock shows.

There are highbush blueberries (Vaccinium corymbosum) on the shores of almost all of our ponds and this year they’ve changed into their fall colors early. They’re beautiful in the fall and rival the colors of the invasive burning bush (Euonymus elatus.)

Though I still haven’t found enough mushrooms to do a full mushroom post I still occasionally find examples that can apparently stand the dryness. Chicken of the woods (Laetiporus sulphureus) mushrooms usually grow in large groups, so I was surprised to find this single one growing in an old woodpile. Another common name for them is sulfur shelf though I’ve worked with sulfur and this mushroom doesn’t remind me of it. The name chicken of the woods comes from the way they taste like chicken when cooked. Finding bright colors in the woods at any time of year is always a surprise and I always feel grateful that I am able to see them. This example was about as big as a dinner plate.

I’ve read that as they age chicken of the woods mushrooms lose their orange color and this one did just that over the course of a day or two. I’ve seen other examples however that have never lost their color, even as they rotted away.

Hen of the woods (Grifola frondosa,) is another edible polypore that often grows in the same spot year after year. They are said to look like the back of a brown hen’s ruffled feathers, and that’s how they come by their common name. I’ve seen only two this year and both were cracked like you can see here.

I’ve had quite a time trying to identify this pretty little bolete and I’m still not sure I’ve got it right but most of the signs point to the red mouth bolete (Boletus subvelutipes) which has a variable colored cap that can be tawny red to yellowish and a red pore bearing surface. One identifying feature that I don’t see on this mushroom is the dark red velvety hairs that are “usually” found at the base of the stalk.

The pore surface of the red mouth bolete is bright scarlet red with yellow at the edges, and this fits the example I found. The red mouth bolete also stains purple at the slightest touch and you can see purple spots on the cap and stem of this example. If it isn’t the red mouth bolete I hope someone can tell me what it is. I found it growing under oaks and hemlocks and by the way, I’ve read that you should never eat a bolete with a red spore surface.

I found some orange fan shaped jelly fungi (Dacryopinax spathularia) growing on a log. Some fungi look like they are erupting from the cracks in the bark and this is one of them. It is an edible fungus which, according to Wikipedia, in China is sometimes included in a vegetarian dish called Buddha’s delight.

As well as fan shaped this small fungus is spatula shaped unlike other jellies that are brain like, and that’s where the spathularia part of the scientific name comes from. This is the first time I’ve seen them.

What I believe were common stinkhorns (Phallus impudicus) have appeared despite the dryness. Their caps looked a bit dry, ragged and tattered and they didn’t last for more than a day. These fungi have an  odor like rotting meat when they pass on.  

The green conical cap is sometimes slimy like this example was. It uses its carrion like odor to attract insects, which are said to disperse its sticky spores. This photo shows its spongy stalk, which feels hollow.

Graceful Hindu dancers glided across the forest floor in the guise of yellow spindle coral (Clavulinopsis fusiformis) mushrooms. Each tiny cylinder is about the same diameter as a piece of cooked spaghetti. This species usually grows in tight clusters, often in the hard packed soil on the side of the trail, but I’ve found them on the forest floor as well.

It’s apple picking time here in New Hampshire and apples are a big business. These examples are red delicious but my personal favorite is an old fashioned variety called northern spy. Northern spy is almost impossible to find in stores these days because they don’t ship well, but you might get lucky at a local orchard. I think many people are surprised to learn that apple trees are not native to the United States. They have all come from old world stock brought over in the 1600s. Apples from Europe were grown in the Jamestown colony and the first non-native apple orchard was planted in Boston in 1625. Only the crab apple is native to this country and they were once called “common” apples. The Native American Abenaki tribe called them “apleziz” and used them for food as well as medicinally.

Peaches are also ripe and ready. Many people, including people who live here, don’t realize that peaches can be grown in New Hampshire but they’ve been grown here for many years.

River grapes (Vitis riparia) are ripe and they’re disappearing quickly. They grow on the banks of rivers and streams, and that’s how they come by the name. They are also called frost grapes because of their extreme cold hardiness. Many birds eat these small grapes including cardinals, mockingbirds, catbirds, robins, wood ducks, several species of woodpecker, cedar waxwings, blue jays, and turkeys. Many animals also love grapes, including foxes, rabbits, raccoons, skunks and opossums. Deer will eat the leaves and new shoots and many birds use the bark for nest building; especially crows. I went back about a week after I took this photo and every grape was gone.

I thought I’d have a hard time identifying these tiny galls I found growing on the underside of an oak leaf but they were relatively easy to find, even though little to nothing is known about the insect that caused them. Dryocosmus deciduous galls are created when a tiny wasp in the Dryocosmus genus lays eggs on the midrib of a red oak leaf. Each tiny gall has a single larva inside. As the scientific name reveals, these galls are deciduous, and fall from the leaf before the leaf falls from the tree.

Gypsy moth egg cases look like they were pasted onto the bark of a tree. European gypsy moths were first brought to the U.S. in 1869 from Europe to start a silkworm business but they escaped and have been in the wild ever since. In the 1970s and 80s gypsy moth outbreaks caused many millions of dollars of damage across the northeast by defoliating and killing huge swaths of forest. I remember seeing, in just about every yard, black stripes of tar painted around tree trunks or silvery strips of aluminum foil wrapped around trunks. The theory was that when the caterpillars crawled up the trunk of a tree to feed they would either get stuck in the tar or slip on the aluminum foil and fall back to the ground. Today, decades later, you can still see the black stripes of tar around some trees. Another gypsy moth population explosion happened in Massachusetts recently and that’s why foresters say that gypsy moth egg cases should be destroyed whenever they’re found.

Though we’ve had some freezing weather turtles seem to have shrugged it off. I don’t know what this one was standing on but I hope it wasn’t the river bottom. If the river is that low they’ll be in trouble.

Mallards are not as tame here as they seem to be in other places and usually when I take a photo of them all I get is tail feathers, but this group showed me a side view. The water of the river glowed in the sunlight like I’ve never seen. What would it be like I wondered, to be swimming along with them, surrounded by this this beautiful glowing light. Bliss, I think.

A great blue hereon found enough water in the river to get knee deep. As soon as it saw me it pretended to be a statue so I left it in stasis and moved on. When it comes to patience these birds have far more than I do, but they’ve also taught me to have more than I once did.  

I thought I’d leave you with a view of coming attractions. Fall came early and is moving quickly this year. Almost all the leaves are already gone from these trees since I took this photo.

Mother Nature is always speaking. She speaks in a language understood within the peaceful mind of the sincere observer. ~Radhanath Swami

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Things I’ve Seen

We’re still very dry here and I haven’t seen hardly any of the mushrooms I’d expect to see but here was a dead birch tree full of golden pholiota mushrooms (Pholiota limonella) just like it was last year. I thought that’s what they were until I smelled them but these examples had no citrus scent, so I’d say they must be Pholiota aurivella which, except for its smaller spores and the lack of a lemon scent, appears identical.

The frustrating thing about mushroom identification is how for most of them you can never be sure without a microscope, and that’s why I never eat them. There are some that don’t have many lookalikes and though I’m usually fairly confident of a good identification for them I still don’t eat them. It’s just too risky.

One of my favorite fungal finds is called the tiger’s eye mushroom (Coltricia perennis.) One reason it’s unusual is because it’s one of the only polypores with a central stem. Most polypores are bracket or shelf fungi. The concentric rings of color are also unusual and sometimes make it look like a turkey tail fungus with a stem. The cap is very thin and flat like a table, and another name for it is the fairy stool. They are very tough and leathery and can persist for quite a long time.

I found it this hen of the woods fungus (Grifola frondosa,) growing at the base of an old oak tree. This edible polypore often grows in the same spot year after year and that makes it quite easy to find. They are said to look like the back of a brown hen’s ruffled feathers, and that’s how they come by their common name. Though they’re said to be brown I see green.

I saw a young fly agaric (Amanita muscaria v. formosa) in a lawn recently. I love the metallic yellow color of these mushrooms when they’re young. They’re common where pine trees grow and this one was under a pine. The name fly agaric comes from the practice of putting pieces of the mushroom in a dish of milk. The story says that when flies drank the milk they died, but it’s something I’ve never tried. Fly agaric is said to have the ability to “turn off” fear in humans and is considered toxic. Vikings are said to have used it for that very reason.

I don’t see many stinkhorn fungi but I hit the stinkhorn jackpot this year; there must have been 20 or more of them growing out of some well rotted wood chips. I think they’re the common stinkhorn (Phallus impudicus) and I have to say that for the first time I smelled odor like rotting meat coming from them because these example were passing on.  

Here was a fresher example. The green conical cap is also said to be slimy but it didn’t look it. This mushroom uses its carrion like odor to attracts insects, which are said to disperse its sticky spores. I saw quite a few small gnat like insects around the dying ones.

At this time of year I always roll logs over hoping to find the beautiful but rare cobalt crust fungus (Terana caerulea,) but usually I find this lighter shade of blue instead. I think it is Byssocorticium atrovirens. Apparently its common name is simply blue crust fungus. Crust fungi are called resupinate fungi and have flat, crust like fruiting bodies which usually appear on the undersides of fallen branches and logs. Resupinate means upside down, and that’s what many crust fungi appear to be. Their spore bearing surface can be wrinkled, smooth, warty, toothed, or porous and though they appear on the undersides of logs the main body of the fungus is in the wood, slowly decomposing it. They seem to be the least understood of all the fungi.

Some slime molds can be very small and others quite large. This one in its plasmodium stage was wasn’t very big at all, probably due to the dryness. When slime molds are in this state they are usually moving-very slowly. Slime molds are very sensitive to drying out so they usually move at night, but they can be found on cloudy, humid days as well. I think this one might be spreading yellow tooth slime (Phanerochaete chrysorhiza.) Slime molds, even though sometimes covering a large area, are actually made up of hundreds or thousands of single entities. These entities move through the forest looking for food or a suitable place to fruit and eventually come together in a mass.

Jack in the pulpit berries (Arisaema triphyllum) are ripe and red, waiting for a deer to come along and eat them. Deer must love them because they usually disappear almost as soon as they turn red. All parts of the Jack in the pulpit plant contain calcium oxalate crystals that cause painful irritation of the mouth and throat if eaten, but Native Americans knew how to cook the fleshy roots to remove any danger. They used them as a vegetable, and that’s why another name for the plant is “Indian turnip.”

False Solomon’s seal (Smilacina racemosa) berries are fully ripe and are now bright red instead of speckled. Native American’s used all parts of this plant including its roots, which contain lye and must be boiled and rinsed several times before they can be used. Birds, mice, grouse, and other forest critters eat the ripe berries that grow at the end of the drooping stem. They are said to taste like molasses and another common name for the plant is treacle berry.

American mountain ash (Sorbus americana) is a native tree but you’re more likely to find them growing naturally north of this part of the state. I do see them in the wild, but rarely. Their red orange fruit in fall and white flowers in spring have made them a gardener’s favorite and that’s where you’ll see most of them here though they prefer cool, humid air like that found in the 3000 foot elevation range. The berries are said to be low in fat and very acidic, so birds leave them for last. For some reason early settlers thought the tree would keep witches away so they called it witch wood. Native Americans used both the bark and berries medicinally. The Ojibwe tribe made both bows and arrows from its wood, which is unusual. Usually they used wood from different species, or wood from both shrubs and trees.

Kousa dogwood fruit looks a little different but it’s the edible part of a Kousa Dogwood (Cornus kousa.) This dogwood is on the small side and is native to Asia. I don’t see it too often. It is also called Japanese or Korean Dogwood. Kousa Dogwood fruit is made up of 20-40 fleshy carpels. In botany one definition of a carpel is a dry fruit that splits open, into seed-bearing sections. Kousa dogwood fruits are said by some to taste like papaya.  

In my own experience I find it best to leave plants with white berries alone because they are usually poisonous, and no native plant illustrates this better than poison ivy (Toxicodendron radicans.) Though many birds can eat its berries without suffering, when most humans so much as brush against the plant they can itch for weeks afterward, and those who are particularly sensitive could end up in the hospital. I had a friend who had to be hospitalized when his eyes became swollen shut because of it. Eating any part of the plant or even breathing the smoke when it is burned can be very dangerous.

All parts of the yew tree (Taxus) are poisonous except (it is said) the red flesh of the berry, which is actually a modified seed cone. The seed within the seed cone is the most toxic part of the plant and eating as few as 3 of them can cause death in just a few hours. In February of 2014 a man named Ben Hines died in Brockdish, Norfolk, England after ingesting parts of yew trees. Nobody has ever been able to figure out why he did such a thing but the incident illustrated how extremely toxic yews are.

Beavers are trying to make a pond in a river and they had dammed it up from bank to bank. It wasn’t the biggest beaver dam I’ve seen but it was quite big. The largest beaver dam ever found is in Canada’s Wood Buffalo National Park and spans about 2,800 feet. It has taken several generations of beavers since 1970 to build and it can be seen from space. Imagine how much water it is holding back!

Eastern or Virginia carpenter bees (Xylocopa virginica) are huge; at least as big as half my thumb. They also look very different than the bumblebees that I’m used to. These bees nest in wood and eat pollen and nectar. They don’t eat wood but they will excavate tunnels through rotten wood. The adults nest through winter and emerge in spring. Though it is said to be common in the eastern part of the country I I see very few. I’ve read that they can be up to an inch long and this one was all of that. Females can sting but they do so only when bothered. Males don’t have a stinger.

Folklore says that the wider the orangey brown band on a wooly bear caterpillar is, the milder the winter will be. If we’re to believe it then this winter will not be very mild because this wooly bear has more black than brown on it. In any event this caterpillar won’t care, because it produces its own antifreeze and can freeze solid in winter. Once the temperatures rise into the 40s F in spring it thaws out and begins feeding on dandelion and other early spring greens. Eventually it will spin a cocoon and emerge as a beautiful tiger moth. From that point on it has only two weeks to live.

The upper surface of a painted lady’s wings look very different than the stained glass look of the undersides but unfortunately I can’t show that to you because the photos didn’t come out. This painted lady was kind enough to land just in front of me on a zinnia. It’s the only one I’ve seen this year.

There is little that is more appropriate than a bee sleeping on a flower, in my opinion. Here in southwestern New Hampshire we don’t see many wildflowers in October, but every now and then you can find a stray something or other still hanging on. The bumblebee I saw on this aster early one morning was moving but very slowly, and looked more like it was hanging on to the flower head rather than harvesting pollen. Bumblebees I’ve heard, sleep on flowers, so maybe it was just napping. I suppose if it has to die in winter like bumblebees do, a flower is the perfect place to do that as well. Only queen bumblebees hibernate through winter; the rest of the colony dies. In spring the queen will make a new nest and actually sit on the eggs she lays to keep them warm, just like birds do.

It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see. ~Henry David Thoreau

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Fall Mushrooms

I saw quite a few mushrooms in September, including some I’ve never seen before, and I’m still finding them in October. This chicken of the woods (Laetiporus sulphureus) mushroom was the biggest and most colorful. Another common name for them is sulfur shelf though I’ve worked with sulfur and this mushroom doesn’t remind me of it. I’ve read that as they age they lose the orange color but I don’t believe it now because I was able to watch these examples every day and they never lost their orange, even as they rotted away. The name chicken of the woods comes from the way they taste like chicken when cooked. Finding bright colors in the woods at any time of year is always a surprise and I always feel grateful that I was able to see them. This fungus was a beautiful thing and about as big as a soccer ball.

Chicken of the woods is yellow on the underside and has pores rather than gills. The pores are there in this photo but they are far too small to see.

We’ve seen the chicken so now for the hen. Hen of the woods (Grifola frondosa,) is an edible polypore that often grows in the same spot year after year. They are said to look like the back of a brown hen’s ruffled feathers, and that’s how they come by their common name. Though they’re said to be brown I always see green. My color finding software sees bands of gray, peach puff, and rosy brown, which is a surprise. I’ve seen a lot of these this year and every one grew at the base of an oak.

There is a whitish tan mushroom that grows on lawns and in the woods and isn’t very exciting so I’ve always ignored it.  After some research I found that it’s called the bluing bolete (Gyroporus cyanescens,) and if I had known that it turned a beautiful cornflower blue where it was bruised I would have looked more closely.

The bluing bolete is said to be edible but I certainly wouldn’t eat it or any mushroom without an expert’s identification. This mushroom contains a compound called variegatic acid which is colorless until it is exposed to oxygen. Once exposed it quickly turns blue, in this case. It can also turn red, I’ve read.

Dyer’s Polypore (Phaeolus schweinitzii) is also called the velvet topped fungus because of its hairy appearance. These fungi are parasitic on the roots and heartwood of living white pines in the eastern U.S. and cause root rot. They also change color as they age. If found when young as this one was it can be used to dye wool a soft yellow or orange and older examples will dye wool brown.

This is what an older dyer’s polypore looks like. As you can see the color difference between young and old examples is dramatic.  Some of these mushrooms can get quite large but this one was only about 5 inches across. Though they sometimes look as if they’re growing on the ground as this one does, they’re really growing on conifer roots or buried logs.

If you saw this growing on a fallen branch would you know what it was? I wasn’t absolutely sure until I turned it over.

I knew it was some type of shelf or bracket fungi from the back but I didn’t know it was turkey tails (Trametes versicolor.) I never knew their undersides were so pure white when they were young. When older the underside is kind of off white and full of pores. I also always thought they grew singly, but in clusters. The back view shows they’re actually all one body.

Golden pholiota (Pholiota limonella) mushrooms grew on a birch tree, which is something I’ve never seen before. In fact there are very few mushrooms that I’ve seen growing on a living birch, but these mushrooms can grow on living or dead wood. They appear in the summer and fall and usually form in large clusters. Their orange-yellow caps are slimy and covered in reddish scales. The dim morning light really brought out the golden color of these examples.

Wolf’s milk slime mold (Lycogala epidendrum) starts out as tiny pink globules but as they age and become more like what we see in the above photo. As they grow the globules look more like small puffballs growing on a log.

Wolf’s milk slime mold is also called toothpaste slime and that’s because there is a pinkish orange material inside each globule with (usually) the consistency of toothpaste. It can also have a more liquid consistency as it does here, and that’s the way I usually find it. As it ages it will turn into a mass of brown powdery spores.

Some coral fungi come to a blunt, rather than pointed end and are called club shaped corals. I thought these might be Clavariadelphus truncatus but that mushroom has wrinkles down its length and these are smooth, so I’m not sure what they are. They were no more than an inch tall.

Crown coral fungi come in many colors but I usually find the tan / white varieties. The example in this photo was as big as a baseball (about 3 inches) and had a touch of orange, which I was happy to see. The way to tell if you have a crown coral fungus is by the tips of the branches, which in crown coral look like tiny crowns rather than blunt or rounded. They grow on dead wood but if that wood is buried they can appear to be growing in soil.

Mushroom spores are carried by the wind so it is unusual to see them dropping to the forest floor like they have in the above photo. I’ve only seen this happen three times and twice it was on a still, hot, humid day. This time it was on a cooler but still humid day, without a hint of a breeze to blow the spores away.

An unusual mushroom that I’ve never paid attention to before is the black tooth fungus (Phellodon niger.) One of things that I find unusual about it is how, when they grow close enough together, their caps fuse together creating a large misshapen mass. But as this photo shows they also grow singly, as most of the ones I saw on this day did. Another odd thing about it is how the caps seem to split open on top.

On the underside of the black tooth’s cap are the black “teeth” that give it its common name. The teeth are called spines and the mushroom’s spores form on them. It’s easy to see how the spore bearing surface increases when a mushroom grows pores or spines on its cap. I’ve read that this mushroom is endangered in many countries like Switzerland and parts of the U.K. and there is a danger of its extinction in certain parts of the world. They seem to be abundant in this area.

This bracket fungus had all the makings of a dryad’s saddle (Cerioporus squamosus) except for color. Dryad’s saddle is usually brown but I can’t find any information on whether or not they start out life white before turning brown. I have seen photos of them online where they looked whitish, but that could be due to lighting or camera settings. This one was definitely white all over and as big as a saucer.

One of the things about nature study that some people seem to have trouble with is leaving things dangling, with no answers.  When I go into the woods I almost always come back with more questions than answers but quite often, sometimes even years later, the answer comes to me. The question on this day was this grouping of grayish mushrooms growing on a stump. I’ve looked through three mushroom guides and a few websites and haven’t found a single small grayish mushroom with a frayed cap edge. I was fairly sure I’d have trouble identifying them but I wanted their photo anyway, because I thought they were very pretty. Sometimes we have to remind ourselves that mystery is a big part of living, and I’ve had to do so yet again.

These little white mushrooms presented another conundrum but I think they might be one called Xerula megalospora. Unfortunately I’ll probably never be 100% sure, because you need a microscope to see the big, lemon shaped spores and I don’t have one.

What leads me to think that this example might be a Xerula megalospora is how mushroom expert Michael Kuo explains that “its gills are attached to the stem by means of a notch and a tiny tooth that runs down the stem.” For me though, their beauty is more important than their name and this one was quite beautiful; even more so upside down.

There is no end to wonder once one starts really looking.― Marty Rubin

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Things I’ve Seen

 

Though we’ve had a rainy day or two the drought has brought the level of the Ashuelot River down to the point where islands have appeared where they’ve never been, and they’re already covered with grasses and wildflowers. It would be quicker to walk down the middle of it than trying to navigate it in a boat. I don’t think you would even get your knees wet now, but in a normal summer it would be about waist deep here.

Extreme zooming showed the flowers were nodding bur marigolds (Bidens cernua.) I don’t know how they and the grasses grew on the islands so fast.

It’s cooling off quickly now and morning temperatures have been in the 30s and 40s, but great blue heron are still with us. They can take a lot of cold and can sometimes be seen even when there’s snow on the ground.

This one walked slowly into the pickerel weeds as I watched. It was nice to see one that wasn’t practicing to be a statue for a change.

The hickory tussock moth caterpillar (Lophocampa caryae) is black and white and can cause quite an itchy rash, from what I’ve read. The nettle like hairs can break off and stick in the skin and they are said to bother some people enough for them to be hospitalized, so it’s probably best to look and not touch this one.

We’ve had a poor mushroom season because of the dryness but there are occasional surprises, like these brown mushrooms colonizing a log. I think they were in the Galerina genus, which contains some of the most toxic mushrooms known including the deadly galerina (Galerina marginata.) Mushroom hunters would be wise to study them and know them well.

This large leathery bracket fungus grew on a tree root and looked like a well-worn saddle. I haven’t been able to identify it.

Do mushrooms grow back in the same place year after year? Yes, some do and this convoluted bracket fungus is a good example of that. I found it at the base of a large oak tree last year and here it is again. I believe that it is hen of the woods (Grifola frondosa,) which is an edible polypore that often grows in the same spot year after year. They are said to look like the back of a brown hen’s ruffled feathers, and that’s how they come by their common name. Though they’re said to be brown I see green and my color finding software sees gray.

Hen of the woods mushroom caps are attached to each other by short white stems. They appear at the base of oak trees in September and October and can be quite large; sometimes two feet across. In China and Japan they are used medicinally. Science has found that they contain blood sugar lowering compounds that could be beneficial in the treatment of diabetes.

This was a first for me; the white mushrooms were growing out of the black decaying gills of another mushroom. I’m not quite sure how to explain it.

Jack in the pulpit berries (Arisaema triphyllum) are ripe and red, waiting for a deer to come along and eat them. Deer must love them because they usually disappear almost as soon as they turn red.

I found a Jack in the pulpit that someone had kicked over and I washed the bulbous root (corm) off in a nearby stream so we could see it. All parts of the Jack in the pulpit plant contain calcium oxalate crystals that cause painful irritation of the mouth and throat if eaten, but Native Americans knew how to cook the fleshy roots to remove any danger. They used them as a vegetable, and that’s why another name for the plant is “Indian turnip.” My father in law liked hot foods and would eat hot peppers right out of the jar, but when he bit off a small piece of this root one day he said it was the hottest thing he’d ever tasted.

False Solomon’s seal (Smilacina racemosa) berries are fully ripe and are now bright red instead of speckled. Native American’s used all parts of this plant including its roots, which contain lye and must be boiled and rinsed several times before they can be used. Birds, mice, grouse, and other forest critters eat the ripe berries that grow at the end of the drooping stem. They are said to taste like molasses and another common name for the plant is treacle berry.

All parts of the yew tree (Taxus) are poisonous except (it is said) the red flesh of the berry, which is actually a modified seed cone. The seed within the seed cone is the most toxic part of the plant and eating as few as 3 of them can cause death in just a few hours. In February of 2014 a man named Ben Hines died in Brockdish, Norfolk, England after ingesting parts of yew trees. Nobody has ever been able to figure out why he did such a thing but the incident illustrated how extremely toxic yews are.

Many birds love Virginia creeper berries (Parthenocissus quinquefolia,) including thrushes, woodpeckers, warblers, vireos, mockingbirds chickadees, and turkeys. So do mice, red fox, skunks, chipmunks, squirrels, and deer. I’ve read that birds are attracted to red fruits more than the blue black berries of Virginia creeper, so the vine compensates by having red leaves in the fall when the berries are ripe. When the birds land amidst all the attractive red hues they find and eat the berries. Since thirty five species of birds eat them it must be successful.

On Virginia creeper even the flower stems (petioles) are red.

Burnt orange must be one of the most frequently seen colors in the fall and this royal fern (Osmunda regalis var. spectabilis) wore it well. Royal fern is the only fern that grows on every temperate continent except Australia, which makes it one of the most widespread of all living species. They are also thought to be one of the oldest living things, with fossil records of the Osmundaceae family dating back over 300 million years. Individual plants are thought to be able to live 100 years or more. They like wet feet and grow along stream and river banks in low, damp areas.

Sensitive fern (Onoclea sensibilis) gets its common name from early colonials, who noticed that it was very sensitive to frost. Usually by this time of year these ferns would be brown and crisp from frost but since we haven’t had a real frost yet this year this example is slowly turning white. In my experience it’s unusual to see this particular fern doing this. Lady ferns (Athyrium filix-femina) do the same each fall and are usually the only white fern that we see. This is only the second time I’ve seen a sensitive fern do this.

Burning bush (Euonymus alatus) almost makes up for its invasiveness by showing beautiful colors like these each fall, but Its sale and importation is banned here in New Hampshire now because of the way it can take over whole swaths of forest floor. Ironically not that many years ago though, homeowners were encouraged to plant it by the state, which touted its attractiveness to birds and other wildlife. The saying “Be careful what you wish for” comes to mind.

The crinkly leaves of Virgin’s bower (Clematis virginiana) continue to turn purple. Despite its being toxic enough to cause internal bleeding this native vine was called was called “pepper vine” by early pioneers because they used it as a pepper substitute when they couldn’t get the real thing. Native Americans used clematis to treat migraine headaches and nervous disorders, and for skin infections.

Speaking of toxic plants, poison ivy is putting on its fall show. It’s often one of the most colorful plants on the forest floor but no matter the leaf color they’re still toxic, and so are the stems that they grow on. I usually get a rash on my knees in early spring by kneeling on the leafless vines to take photos of wildflowers. Luckily I’m not that sensitive to it, but I know people who have been hospitalized because of it.

The morning had dawned clear and cold, with a crispness that hinted at the end of summer. ~George R.R. Martin

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