Not entirely barren...

Yesterday's jaunt into the wild here in the high country, to look around and see if the rain has had any effect on mushroom fruiting was cut short by yet some more rain. I did, however, get a chance to visit one known mushroom site of mine, and as I waded through the knee-high vegetation, my heart skipped a beat when I saw a cluster of freshly sprouted mushrooms. I didn't have a camera, so I collected a specimen to study at home.





This mushroom has a convex, smooth cap about 5 inches in diameter, with straight margins that exhibit striations. The gills are free and crowded. The stalk is equal, with a smooth lower half, exhibiting what appear to be yellowish scales toward the cap. There is a universal veil (volva) at the bottom of the stalk, and a yellow partial veil under the cap. The spore print of this mushroom is white.

Unfortunately, the only book I have at hand right now is Evenson's Mushrooms of Colorado, which isn't very helpful (at least, not after spending about 15 minutes with it). From what I can remember of my other reading, I'm thinking this is a member of the Amanita family.

I observed no other mushrooms before having to call it an afternoon.

Drew called to say he saw some mushrooms - one of which he described as a "puffball with a stalk" - while driving his UPS route. I don't know if he collected a specimen, as our cell connection was pretty bad. I'll find out later, I guess.

Cheers...

P.S. Just for fun, I scanned the underside of the cap at 600 dpi. The resulting file was over 200 MB in size, but after cropping and converting to an 85% JPEG, the file has become much more manageable (under 2 MB), and can be found here.

Oddities & curiosities...

While in Durango this past week, I stopped by the transplanted natural foods store and, among other purchases, picked up a package containing 8 envelopes of kefir yeast.

The instructions call for scalding a quart of milk and allowing it to cool to room temperature, after which one dissolves the contents of one package in the milk and waits 24 hours. The resulting product is refrigerated, presumably requiring another envelope to be opened to make the next quart.

After making my first batch of home-made kefir that came "of age" just after lunch today, I reserved about a quarter cup of the product and added another scalded-and-cooled quart of milk to see if the process can be extended (along the lines of the way yogurt is made). Time will tell.

* * *Drew stopped by this morning, but without any mushroom specimens. He suggested a likely location along the Blanco River, and I took the opportunity today to go for a walk in a different part of the woods, and took Shiloh along for good measure.

I narrowly missed miring the Ford on a muddy track I had turned onto, and so proceeded down the main road, parking close to the shoulder to look around from time to time. I passed a broad hillside that looked inviting, so I got out and climbed to the top, coming to regret my decision about two-thirds of the way up. The path wasn't hard, but it was muddy and slippery. For her part, Shiloh did not like the cactus plants that were plentiful on that slope.

Once at the top of the ridge (where I was located, says Google Earth, at 37.215005° N, -106.872590° W), I turned around and took several photographs of the view, and stitched them together into the following panorama (clicking on it will bring up the "full size" 3908 x 1343 pixel image):



There were very few mushrooms in evidence. The only ones I saw were small, growing on branches of scrub oak lying on the ground, with a pattern of gills/pores(?) that I'm pretty sure I've seen before, but haven't paid attention to. Here's a scan:



I was fortunate to have the sun out and shining during my nature walk. Soon after returning home, however, more weather moved in and we got properly pelted with wind, thunder, lightning, and more rain. Personally, I can do with less of the first three; I'm fine with having it rain every day from now until mid-August.

I'm entertaining a hypothesis that the few mushrooms that have sprouted as a result of recent rainfall are members of the population that are several sigmas out on the fruiting distribution, by which I mean they are oddball mushrooms that have jumped the gun in terms of bursting out the ground way in advance of when they are "supposed" to.

I've seen this before, in particular, in observing a (literal) handful of shaggy manes that popped out of the ground along Fourmile Road a few weeks before the appearance of the main mass.

Cheers...