Last year, a friend on Facebook posted a bunch of photos she’d taken of amazing mushrooms growing in a nearby forest. As I walk the same trails as she does (we run into each other periodically, to the great delight of our dogs), I was both delighted (yay, there are mushrooms in those woods!) and a little envious (how come I never find any mushrooms?!?).
Try as I might, however, I simply couldn’t find any beyond the obvious bracket fungi growing out of the sides of trees.
This year, that changed. I’m not sure if it was the particularly damp August we had, or if I just developed my fungi-hunting eye, but suddenly there were mushrooms everywhere — and such a cool variety, too. I hoped to identify them using a field guide my daughter got me a couple of Christmases ago, but it turns out that (a) all my angles were wrong (I need pics of the undersides more than the tops); and (b) mushroom identification is a whole lot more complicated than I thought (involving spore prints and really, really careful observation).
Next year I’ll take my field guide out into the woods with me (or bring some actual mushrooms home) and try this again. For now, however, I’ll have to settle for pretty pictures of funky fungi. 😉 (Of course, if there are any mycologists out there who see something they recognize, I would love to know! 😀 )
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