alexpgp | Mushroom bounty

Mushroom season around these parts typically occurs in the second half of August, although one of the results of last year's copious daily rains was an early season that kicked off about a month early. I hadn't been around earlier in the summer, but I was reliably informed that rainfall this year was not anything to make a big deal about, and mushrooming treks made earlier this season were initially successful, but subsequently disappointing.

Yesterday, after noticing an eruption of mushrooms along the side of the road across from the City Market shopping center, I got to thinking about recent rains and lack of really cold temperatures and I decided—armed only with my trusty canine companion Shiloh, a couple of plastic bags, and a pair of scissors I found in the glove box (which made a serviceable cutting implement)—to travel down a road I call "Shaggy Way" that takes me via a rather circuitous route from "downtown Pagosa Springs" toward home.

It's the kind of road where, from time to time, you can spy the Rockies through the trees.

The photo above was taken scant yards from a stump that has developed a local ecosystem of sorts, comprising moss, lichen, some gray basidiomycete fungus (I think), and a lone example of what might possibly be a Velvet Foot (but I'm guessing).

On the one hand, I like the shot, which I've cropped somewhat, but on the other, the cropping turned out sort of freaky, because the result almost looks like a landscape from the air, where the moss and gray strands look like a forest of some kind, the cracks in the wood look like cliffs, and only the giant orange mushroom is the lone anomaly.

Fantasy aside, I've learned enough, over the years, to reliably recognize some basic mushrooms—chanterelles, king boletes, hawk's wings, aspen boletes, shaggy manes, and even the occasional clutch of oyster mushrooms. My knowledge of other fruiting fungi, especially of gilled mushrooms, is rather sparse.

My spore printing skills are not too shabby, but even with that information, it's pretty clear that I need to make better notes about the environment surrounding the specimens that I find. That, and ask others for pointers so as to have a good point of departure for learning more about specific mushrooms.

Among the specimens I found yesterday were the following:

1. A coral mushroom (Ramaria?). There are a lot of these in the woods.