Friday concluded our trip north, so this post will be the last in the Nature Notes from the North Woods series. It had been far too long since I’d been up in the White Mountains, and I already can’t wait to go back. I hope you enjoy the final installment of photos and notes from Maine.
September 22nd marked the autumn equinox – one of two points in the year where the length of day and night are equal. From here, the length of daylight will continue to shorten as we move towards winter. While I always miss the outdoor exploration opportunities that early evening sunshine affords me, there are so many things to look forward to about autumn. Although traditional “berry season” (i.e., blueberries, raspberries, etc.) is long over, many fruits and nuts are ripening…
The fall is typically mushrooms’ time to shine. It is a time of year when my lawn is typically bursting with a variety of mushroom species, and I see a whole palette of colors on my forest walks (my favorites: the lovely purple Viscid Violet Cort and the bright orange edible Chicken of the Woods). But last summer’s drought made for an underwhelming fall mushroom season. I figured I’d be out of luck with finding interesting new mushrooms until next…
Although I had no intention to look for fungi while I was out on my walk this morning (I was hoping to find some early wildflowers blooming), when you come across something this bizarre looking, you have to stop and investigate further. A fairly atypical look for fungi, these mushrooms had pale yellow hollow bulbs perched atop a thick branchy stalk. Most of the “bulbs” were already split open, but the few that weren’t had the appearance of a baby…
September and October are some of the best months for observing mushrooms, and this is even more true after a heavy rain. Friday’s downpours have caused fungi of all shapes and sizes to spring forth. One that has been continuously catching my eye lately is the viscid violet cort (Cortinarius iodes). Newly emerged viscid violet corts have a bright purple cap, which expands up to 2 1/2 inches in diameter and fades to light lilac or even white or yellowish…
One of the easiest mushrooms to identify in our forests is the chicken-of-the-woods mushroom, also known as sulphur shelf, or more simply: chicken mushroom. Although they have similar names, chicken-of-the-woods and hen-of-the-woods are two entirely different mushrooms (although both are edible). Hen-of-the-woods was so named because someone thought the ruffled brown cluster of caps (usually growing at the base of a tree) resembled the fanned out tail feathers of a portly hen. Chicken-of-the-woods, on the other hand, was given its…
Sunday I participated in a fungi walk led by mycologist Dianna Smith at the Cadwell Memorial Park in Pelham. Despite a recent lack of rain in that part of the state, we still found over 25 different kinds of fungi. For this post, however, I will limit myself to four highlights that I found interesting or bizarre. Toothpaste slime mold (Lycogala epidendrum) Oddly enough, slime molds are not actually fungi, although they often catch the interest of mycologists anyway. These…
A foraging trip in Falmouth today yielded a number of edible mushrooms (in addition to the sighting of a lot of interesting non-edible ones not described here). Basket of foraged edible mushrooms – Coral Fungi, Puffballs and Boletes. The first edible we came across was a Coral Fungi, Clavulina cinerea, also known as the Gray Coral fungi. The individuals we found were approximately 3 to 4 inches tall, and had an erect, coral-like shape, with many branches forming from the…
It was fitting that during my visit to the Wells National Estuarine Research Reserve at Laudholm in Maine, on the weekend just before Halloween, that one of my new discoveries was a phenomenon called witches’ brooms. With many of the leaves blown down by the storm we had the day before, these clustered growths were easy to see, and were apparent on several highbush blueberry and honeysuckle shrubs. The “witches’ brooms” are abnormal growths on the branches of the shrubs,…
The last couple weeks I’ve noticed a series of puffball-like mushrooms with a star-shaped opened outer casing in a sandy area just up gradient from a salt marsh near my house in Bourne. I’m still not 100% sure on the identification, but I think I may have finally identified its genus, Schleroderma, with a potential for it to be Scleroderma polyrhizum. Examples of the mushrooms I found. The bottom picture shows the underside. Scleroderma polyrhizum, commonly called earthstars or earthballs,…