3:00 snapshot #1696: Sunday--Mushroom Class!

[urbpan]

Here's half of my mushroom class from last Sunday. I'm getting less shy about saying, when my alarm goes off, "it's three o'clock, I'm going to take a picture then we should head back--if you don't want to be in the picture let me know!"




While I was in the Mass Audubon gift shop the staff was talking about wasps by the entrance. I said "Oh, I want to see!" I told them this was a great golden digger wasp and that she would go get a katydid to put in this hole and then she wouldn't be by the front door any more.


This mushroom totally stumped me. Gray-brown cap, close gills, very fibrous stipe, growing from the ground in the red pine forest. I took it home and it produced white spores. Still a mystery.


After the class I was loitering in the farm stand when I heard a family talking about a bug. I butted myself in and told them it was some kind of tussock moth caterpillar, and that the coloration was a warning not to touch or eat it. A little bugguide research shows that it's a milkweed tussock moth Euchaetes egle.

Comments

[mmsword.livejournal.com]

Yeah sadly I got no clues on the ID on that mushroom and all my keys for anything like that start asking for spore shapes or chemical tests to determine if it's a flavor of collybioid, melanoleuca or other huge grouping.

[urbpan.livejournal.com]

Glad to hear that it's more complicated than it looks. I always fear that my class thinks I'm terrible for not knowing the identities of mushrooms we find.