The Urban Pantheist

That last post was a rhetorical question obviously.


It turns out we spent 95% of our time in Venice (you know, where Venice Beach is)
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Sure, I can find some pest grasshoppers in a city park, but I'll never find wild organisms on the 26th floor bar on a hotel.


Still, it's a nice view of the ballfield, if you are into that sort of thing.


Suddenly a visitor alights on the opposite side of the glass. Is it a stonefly? A caddisfly? I'm not sure, but it probably emerged from the nearby Mississippi River (seen at the left corner of the pic with the ballfield), then caught a nice breeze upward. It makes me want to study aerial plankton.

In the Dedham mall parking lot.

These are hop marks made by a rat moving quickly through very deep snow. Note the marks made by the tail keeping balance as the animal propels itself using mainly its back feet.

Peekin' in at the end of a meeting.


Not far away, a juvenile red-tail stares into the city streets.

My friend just bought a house in West Roxbury. She was horrified to discover cockroaches in and around it! At my insistence she captured one, and I identified it as an Ectobius cockroach, probably the Mediterranean spotted cockroach E. pallidus, but also maybe the dusky cockroach E. lapponicus. In either case, these are not pest cockroaches—the Latin name Ectobius translates to “lives outside,” which is what they do most of the time. They get into houses about as often as earwigs and maybe a little less often than ladybeetles. Both Ectobius species in New England are native to Europe.

Gray fox kit, Franklin Park, Boston.


Gray fox track.

My dad and I were keen to see manatees. We failed in Big Cypress, and I barely caught a glimpse on Captiva. Fortunately we were blathering about it somewhere and some nice lady suggested we go to Manatee Park. Sounds like just the thing!
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Cottontails are extra visible this time of year--babies are coming out of the nests, and adults are grazing on all the new spring vegetation.
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Hey look what's growing in one of the potted trees in the greenhouse! This is technically indoors, although things from outdoors much larger than mushroom spores do find their way in. I last saw this species back in November of 2006. In that post I noted that the mushroom had once been lumped in with Coprinus mushrooms--those dung-loving fungi that appear quite suddenly, then disappear almost as suddenly as their gills turn to inky liquid to release the spores.


While this species is shaped similarly to true Coprinus mushrooms, and has a similarly short span of activity, it doesn't deliquesce into liquid, and it doesn't grow from dung or compost. These little caps grow from the bases of trees, emerging from mycelium embedded in the soil and bark: plant and substrate bound together with living threads of fungus.


After releasing spores the incredible thin mushroom flesh withers away. The currently accepted name for this species is Coprinellus disseminatus. Some common names given for it include "crumble cap," "fairy bonnet," and rather tellingly obsolete: "non-inky coprinus."