The Urban Pantheist

It may not be as lovely as some of the mushrooms that appear in summer and fall, but Exidia recisa is among the loveliest mushrooms that typically appears in the winter. Translucent, gelatinous, and the color of maple syrup, this mushroom appears on dead twigs blown down in winter rainstorms. In dry weather it dehydrates to a black crust, but can swell back up and resume releasing spores if it gets wet again.

Attempts to give it a common name are surprisingly clumsy, considering how common the mushroom indeed is. "Willow brain" is evocative, but the fungus can grow on a variety of trees; "Brown witch's butter" misses the mark, texturally speaking. The field guides tend to be maddeningly brief when discussing this fruiting body--it often gets a single line at end of the description of another similar-looking or related species.

On the question of edibility--something that occurs to hungry foragers this time of year, when pickings are slim--I have a story I tell my students. I showed a friend--one who is reading this on livejournal and tumblr--how to identify the mushroom when dry and reconstitute it, and she has eaten a great deal of them. And she's still alive.

Hot sunny weekend, perfect for lounging barefoot in the back yard!



These are the field guides on the windowsill right next to where I usually use my laptop. I have a lot more, but the most recently used books end up here.

Nursery web spider Pisaurina mira

Alexis came into the house to get me, "the biggest spider I've ever seen around here!" I would say that it's about tied for size with the Argiope yellow-and-black garden spiders and Carolina wolf spiders that are both known from our area (but not yet from our yard). I instantly thought of fishing spiders, but of course we aren't near enough to water for that to be right.
( more thrilling tales of identification plus terrifying close-up )

Aphid killer, Tribe Syrphini

Alexis noticed this tiny caterpillar surrounded by aphids and ants on the underside of a nasturtium leaf. We deployed our excellent caterpillar guide, looking especially at the slug caterpillars, but came up empty. I looked for nasturtium in the list of caterpillar host plants, but only found the cabbage white, which this was not.

I decided to try bugguide.net, searching for caterpillar + aphids, figuring this relationship probably had been documented before. I found a post making the same wrong assumption we had: that this was a caterpillar. The assumption had been corrected: no dear fool, this is a fly larva. More precisely, it is the larva of a hover fly. Some hover flies start their lives as aphid killers, sluglike maggots that creep along plants gobbling up aphids as they go. There's yet another reason not to kill insects that resemble bees and wasps if you're not sure what they are. The bee-mimic hover fly you kill today won't produce any aphid killers tomorrow.

Astute readers will have realized by now that I have, yet again, cheated. This larva may very well be the same species as one of the adult hover flies I've already counted this year. Alas, there's no way to know, without collecting the aphid killer and rearing it to adulthood--these animals are not as well studied as many others, alas. But I thought the story and the creature were interesting enough that they belonged here, in spite of possibly repeating the same species.

This past Saturday I went to a Winter Mushroom Walk and Talk at Drumlin Farm! It was led by Lawrence Millman, author of that mushroom guide I told you about back in September.

( Read more... )

When I went up to Drumlin to give my mushroom walk and talk yesterday (which cost each participant about the same as a membership to the Boston Mycological Club) I stopped by the Audubon Shop, and discovered a new mushroom book! It's called Fascinating Fungi of New England. There are two things great about that: first, it's specific to New England, and so limits itself to species found here (although anyone east of the Rockies can make perfect use of it); and second, it's not "Edible and Poisonous Fungi of New England," no, the adjective is FASCINATING. Now that's an approach to natural history I can get behind. Nothing against the wild food foragers, but that ain't why I go outside, and I mostly stick to the raspberries anyway.

I've only flipped through it a bit, but I can honestly say that it feels like a book I would have liked to have written. The text covers the natural history of each species, focusing on what makes the mushroom in question interesting, beyond whether it can kill you or if it's nice in an omelette.


Gotta love seeing the urban mushroom species, the winecap, on the cover!

As it turns out, the author is going to be at Drumlin Farm on October first (that's this Saturday) to do a book signing and mushroom walk! For the cost of my field walk, or the BMC membership, you could buy the book and attend the walk--you get a few bucks off if you are a Mass Audubon member, which you should be.

Fine print: I don't get anything from publicizing this event, I just figured some of you would be into it. Also I genuinely like the book, and it's very reasonably priced

Last Saturday my dad and I met in Athol Massachusetts to catch some of the 5th annual Fungus Fair.

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This appears to be a mushroom from the Coprinus lagopus group, which means it's not really a Coprinus (the genus has been fractured--just about the only thing that's still in there is the type species: Shaggy mane) and it's missing the main field marking: a wooly stalk. But darned if I haven't keyed it out in 3 different guides and ended up in the Coprinus lagopus group. The Arora book (Mushrooms demystified) is the most helpful and complete, explaining that the group includes an unknown number of species that look more or less similar. This group is also distinguished by self-digesting extremely rapidly: while the average mushroom produces spores for about 2 weeks, these are gone in a few hours.



I have seen this mushroom emerge from old wet straw bales many times. If I were in charge of naming it, it would be called the self-digesting wet straw mushroom, or maybe the farmer's melting fairy umbrella. In any case, I'm not in charge, but I am pretty sure that in the Northeast we have a mushroom in the Coprinus lagopus group that comes out of soaking wet old straw bales, and it probably already has a real scientific name. It's just that no one really cares enough to give them their own entry in the field guides.