Report suspicious behavior

The moderator of the Boston Birds Google group posted an encounter he had with Homeland Security:
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Why not eat horses?, part 2

I thought I'd just posted about the horse slaughter issue, but apparently it's been a full year. The link in the previous sentence leads to my post about an email (from an animal protection organization I'm interested in), asking us all to lobby congress to make it illegal to slaughter horses for food. Apparently the House of Representatives has approved a bill to this effect.

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365 Urban Species. #251: Oak Maze-gill

Urban species #251: Oak maze-gill Daedalea quercina

In temperate places where oak trees grow, they die and their wood is decayed by the oak maze-gill. Other fungi may do it, too, but it's the only thing that Daedalea quercina does. This mushroom will not appear on other dead trees, though a thin-fleshed look alike, Daedaleopsis confragosa, will grow on dead birches and willows. Though called a maze-gill, the spore-bearing surface technically consists of pores, and this fungus is in the same family as the "polypore" mushrooms, such as Polyporus squamosus (dryad's saddle). The pores are elongated into a distinctive maze-like pattern. Its scientific name alludes to Daedalus, the designer of the labyrinth, and the "quercina" part refers to oak itself (Quercus is the Genus name for oak trees). Oak maze-gill is leathery and perennial, and can be found year-round for many seasons, until it finally turns black and rots away itself.

Plant help needed

There's a dyc (damned yellow composite, if you forgot) that is growing in dozens of locations (mostly roadsides) all around where I live. I'm fairly certain it's in the genus Hieracium. (All the plant people just sputtered out a humorless laugh. There may be anywhere between 200 to more than a thousand species in this very troublesome genus.) It is not hairy, like most hawkweeds. It has leaves all along the stem, more than half the way to the flowers--it looks like most hawkweeds have rosettes only, or just a few leaves up the stem.

Do I have a chance of identifying this thing to species?



My best guess is H. paniculatum, but I don't trust that, since that's a native species, and this thing is behaving like an alien invasive.