The Urban Pantheist

When my coworker drew my attention to these attractive mushrooms on a twig of cherry I was pretty confident I'd be able to identify them. From the top view it looked obvious that these were turkey tail mushrooms Trametes versicolor*.


Then I looked at the underside and something was wrong. The pores on Trametes versicolor are so small that they are difficult to see with the naked eye. These are fairly large, as pores go.

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Taking a look around the Stony Brook Reservation we noticed it was unusually dry: the little swamp I usually photograph was a mud puddle. Here what should be a lush carpet of moss is cracking as the soil below it dries and splits.


Here's something I haven't seen before: turkey tail mushrooms (apparently fresh, from whenever the last rains were) emerging from a burnt log.


Winter is gone, cry the pussy willows as they explode into flower.

Turkey tails.

Alexis and I noticed many things outside today. It was a nice change from noticing things about how we felt and about our workplaces. It's very therapeutic to open ourselves up to noticing the outside world, to see the details and feel aware of the rhythms of nature, even--or perhaps especially--in the city. We walked to Ward's Pond, our favorite place in Boston, tucked away in Olmsted Park between Brookline and Jamaica Plain.

Almost immediately, Alexis noticed that the Canada Geese had gathered in pairs. They moved away from us and our dogs, not in a chaotic swarm, but in orderly twos with the occasional straggling solo goose.

Then a pair of small ducks close to shore caught my eye. The smaller ducks tend to be the shy migrators that stop down from Canada, and they tend to stay out in the middle of Leverett Pond, far from dogs and people in the park. We got closer, and were delighted to not recognize them. Alexis suspected they were teals, and once we got home to look at our field guides, that turned out to be true. They are green-winged teals (Anas crecca), tiny relatives of the mallard, found, with some subspecies variation, throughout the Northern Hemisphere's waters.

just a glimpse through the swamp dogwood as they swim away( Read more... )