Marvelous Morels

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Thirty years I've lived here in Ainsworth and never saw a morel on my three acres before.

This year I found four of them out there. Would have been five, but I accidentally ran over one with my lawn tractor.

The stars aligned somehow, I guess. It will probably never happen again.

I sauteed them in olive oil with garlic, soy sauce and white wine. Unbelievably delicious.

Crown-Tipped Coral

Found this interesting fungus while walking my dogs in the woods north of Big Maple Lake on a wet day.


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It looks a bit like Crown-Tipped Coral, but I'm not sure those really are "crowns" on top of each stalk. It might be Yellow-Tipped Coral. The first is edible, the second is poisonous.

Eyelash Cup Mushrooms

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These mushrooms get their name from the short hair-like fringe around the cup.

They are small (.25" to .75") and low-growing. I think I would have missed them if I hadn't bent down to pull up some beggar tick plants, and would have missed them still if they weren't orange.

They grow in groups on rotten wood.

Wild Mushrooms of Ainsworth: Splash Cups

I had never seen "bird's nest"-type mushrooms before, and I almost didn't see them this time, because these mushrooms are tiny — perhaps 1/4" to 1/3" in diameter — and low-growing … not at all conspicuous:


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You have to look closely to the see "eggs" in the "nest."



Per the National Audobon Society Field Guide to North American Mushrooms by Gary H. Lincoff:

The "eggs" are actually little seedlike cases, called peridioles, that contain parts of the spore mass, or gleba. The "nests" are splash cups that disperse the eggs when raindrops fall in.

I like the picture above because you can see the cups in various stages of opening up. Here are some immature ones:



They are very difficult to photograph! Here's another attempt, in the sun:

Wild Mushrooms of Ainsworth: Scrambled-Egg Slime

Also known as dog-vomit slime, this stuff popped up overnight a couple of times when the weather was miserably hot and humid.


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It soon becomes dark and crusty, and when it's dried and you run over it with the lawn mower, it sends up a dark cloud of spores.

OK, so it's not a true mushroom, but it's in my mushroom identification guide.

Wild Mushrooms of Ainsworth: Bear's Head Tooth

Found this mushroom (about 4" wide) on a felled deciduous tree in Deep River County Park. It doesn't look exactly like a Bear's Head Tooth, but it looks even less like anything else. It's been through a few freeze-and-thaw cycles already, which may have affected its appearance.

View from the side:


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From the bottom:




None of the other pictures I took came out.

Wild Mushrooms of Ainsworth: Stinkhorns!

I think I have solved the mystery of last summer's ugly mushrooms: they were immature stinkhorns. They never matured, perhaps because of the drought.

But now their relatives are springing up. And once again I'm finding the sort of mushroom that long ago I misidentified as an out-of-season black morel, until someone more knowledgeable came along and set me straight.

So basically this is the tale of "The Ugly Duckling" as told by mushrooms: an ugly child grows up and transforms into something not only magnificently ugly but also foul-smelling.

Here is the veil. The stinkhorn is inside.

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This veil has ruptured. You can see the clear slime, and little clots of dirt suspended in it cast shadows on the body of the stinkhorn inside.


Here's what that ruptured veil had produced by late the next morning.


Disgusting, isn't it?

By late afternoon, it looked like this:



Old age and youth, side by side:


This is the old man when he was in his prime (white cardboard behind for contrast):


This is known as the "common stinkhorn," of which there are two varieties, and based on the purple tinge of the veil, I think what we've got here is Phallus hadriani. MushroomExpert.com has an interesting article about common stinkhorns.

They really do stink, by the way. I didn't notice it at first, but once I got up close and personal with one, so I could recognize the smell — then I found I could recognize it from about five feet away.

Ugly Mushrooms of Ainsworth(Random Pointless Photos)

Found these mushrooms growing next to my house. They don't look like anything in my mushroom book, so I don't know what they are, other than ugly.


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They are low-growing, about an inch in diameter, covered with a light grayish-brown purple-tinged veil that ruptures to reveal a slimy white blob.





I will watch to see if they turn into anything recognizable as they mature.

Wild Mushrooms of Ainsworth: Witches' Butter

Not 100% sure, but I think this is a baby specimen of Witches' Butter.


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I found this out back of my house on a dead tree limb that had been lying in a stack of dead tree limbs.

According to my Audubon North American mushroom guide, Witches' Butter appears as an "irregularly lobed mass of golden jelly" on deciduous wood, and can be found year-round. I haven't got any lobes here, just dots; but an image search turns up a few similar pictures.

It is edible. (As usual, I didn't eat it.)

Wild Mushrooms of Ainsworth: Blusher

Here we go with another very tentative mushroom identification. I think this is a blusher.


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Its scientific name is Amanita rubescens. Of course I, as a Dorothy Sayers fan, got excited upon learning that — but a little more research taught me that the European species differs from the North American, so this may not be exactly the mushroom that played a central role in The Documents in the Case, though, like its European cousin, it can easily be confused with a deadly poisonous species.

The name "blusher" refers to the tendency of its skin to bruise reddish. I took an immature specimen and bruised its stem, just to see:



Looks somewhat reddish to me. That photo is interesting also in that it shows the partial veil stretching from the outer edge of the cap to the stem, covering the immature gills. As the cap expands, the veil ruptures and remains as a ring around the stem.



The stem thickens toward the base to form a club shape.

Wild Mushrooms of Ainsworth: Wolf's-milk Slime

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Found on a log in my field. I popped that one at the bottom to see what was inside. It looks like brains, doesn't it? Well, some people think it looks like toothpaste, which is why another name for this stuff is Toothpaste Slime.

Says Wikipedia: "Lycogala epidendrum, commonly known as wolf's milk or groening's slime, is a cosmopolitan species of plasmodial slime mould which is often mistaken for a fungus." I made that mistake myself, at first, thinking these were mushrooms.*

Its growing season is supposed to be June through November, but what with the early spring this year, I guess it got a head start.

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*Yes, the title of the post says, "Wild Mushrooms," and so does the indexing label. So sue me.

Wild Mushrooms of Ainsworth: Split-Gill Polypore

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I thought I had posted some pics of these before, but I can't find them, which is just fine because the pics I took before were even worse.

My mushroom book is out on loan at the moment, so I can't look up anything authoritative about these. A little internet looking-around reveals that their scientific name is Schizophyllum commune, and you can buy split-gill polypore extract if you want to.

I don't know which side is up on these things, so I just call it split side (above) and fuzzy side (below).



Found on a dead tree limb on the forest floor in Deep River County Park.

Wild Mushrooms of Ainsworth: Violet Toothed Polypore

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Found on a fallen tree in Deep River County Park. It would be utterly boring if not for that violet margin. I think these are older specimens, or they would be more flamboyant.

Wild Mushrooms of Ainsworth: Wood Clitocybe

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Found on a fallen tree in Deep River County Park. Not entirely sure of the identification, because Wood Clitocybe is described in my guide as yellowish-grey, and these are more yellowish-brown-grey. But they don't look like anything else.

In checking on how to pronounce the name, I came across this charming mushroom site.

Wood clitocybe is not a terribly interesting mushroom, but I certainly did take a lot of pictures of it. Here are the gills:


And the caps:

Wild Mushrooms of Ainsworth: Crowded Parchment

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Found these on a fallen tree in Deep River County Park. They are small — 1/8" to 5/8" according to my mushroom guide, but it's hard to tell where one leaves off and the next begins, as they seem to run together.

I found a number of varieties of mushrooms on my walk in the woods today, but some of them were on the forest floor and it's been raining for two days straight. I am not that interested in mushrooms.

Wild Mushrooms of Ainsworth: Walnut Mycena

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I had to get up close and personal with the forest floor to discover that these little guys were indeed growing on the remains of walnut or hickory nut shells.

Tiny, delicate mushrooms, the largest cap being about 3/8" in diameter.


Found in Deep River County Park.

Wild Mushrooms of Ainsworth: Russula

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I believe this is some species of Russula. It looks like the picture of Shellfish-scented Russula in my mushroom guide, but I didn't smell shellfish! Maybe you have to get closer to it than I did.

The cap is about 2" in diameter.

Found growing all by its lonesome on the forest floor in Deep River County Park.

Wild Mushrooms of Ainsworth: Spiny Puffball

Small blobs on the ground, covered in little spines (not sharp) that are fused together at their tops in groups. These are rather puny specimens, the largest being about 1" in diameter.

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Says my mushroom guide: "This puffball is one of several possessing long, fused spines; its accurate identification to species requires seeing all stages of development."

Wild Mushrooms of Ainsworth: Fawn Mushroom

Found this out by the tomato garden. Its cap was about 2" in diameter. Nothing particularly interesting about it.




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Wild Mushrooms of Ainsworth: Rooting Polypore(?)

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This business of working on two blogs at once (yes, I'm still adding images to Downtown Hobart, and last Saturday at the museum I got a bunch more) at the busy, tomato-picking, zucchini-freezing time of year has really put a damper on my wild-stuff activity. But if I happen to stumble upon a polypore while I'm mowing my lawn, I can stop and identify it. Or at least try.

I think this is a Rooting Polypore (because it must be something and it doesn't look like anything else).

It doesn't grow sideways like that. I had to pick so I could see the stem and underside. And then lay it down on the grass in order to photograph it.

My mushroom guide is silent on the subject of whether it's edible.