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Getting out early...
Aug. 26th, 2009 09:54 pmI rose early and decided to go out and see if the moisture that fell over the past few days has encouraged any fungi to flower, so to speak.
The first stop was Lobo Point, where Feht, Maria, and I had gone last Wednesday, and there were still no mushrooms to be seen, although everything (except, perhaps, the temperature) felt and looked right. I made a stop or two more on the way back to Pagosa, with similar results.
As I passed through town, I debated taking "the long way home" (40 miles instead of 6), along Four-Mile Road and then Plumtaw Road, which would bring me to Piedra Road and eventually back to my own neighborhood. In the end, I decided that even if I didn't see a single mushroom, it was an opportunity for me to expose myself to The Great Outdoors, and maybe learn something in the process.
After Plumtaw enters the National Forest, it starts to twist and turn like piece of well-cooked spaghetti. As I came around one turn, I surprised a huge brown bird - almost certainly a hawk or maybe even an eagle, judging from its size - that was drinking from a puddle, but which took off in quite a hurry as the Ford came around the bend. It lazily gained the top of a dead tree about 50 yards away, and I took a shot of it, cropped below.
I found exactly one Shaggy Mane mushroom along the entire 19-mile stretch of Plumtaw. This happens to be exactly the same number of Shaggies I found on a similar run down Plumtaw this past Monday, and both their number and condition are a subject of scientific curiosity for me.
The first curious thing was that these were individual Shaggies. This by itself is unusual, because, generally speaking, Shaggies hang out in squads, which is to say they "erupt" in small groups.
Second, although both individual specimens looked as if they had just popped out of the ground (photo below, left), their gills tell a different story (photo below, right)
The biology of the Shaggy (aka Coprinus comatus) is such that, soon after emerging from the ground, its gills start to turn pink, then gray, then black as the tissue progressively self-digests, eventually forming a black goop that resembles ink (which is why these mushrooms are also known as "Inky Caps"). The only way to check this process with harvested Shaggies is to cook them as soon as possible after getting home.
In any event, in my experience, a Shaggy that looks like the freshly-sprouted specimen above ought not to be in such an advanced state of self-digestion.
So I ask myself: What is going on? Is it the weather? Has it been too cold? Not wet enough? Is there some genetic memory at work here, in which the mycelia of local species have calculated - for whatever reason - that it's just not worth the effort to push out fruiting bodies this year?
As I came to the end of Plumtaw, I looked to my right and then stopped the car near the Debs School, a national historic site in the middle of nowhere, which was attended from 1909 to 1950 by local kids in grades 1-8. Across the road from the school was a really glorious panorama that the stitched shot below just hints at.
Despite the lack of mushrooms, the game was worth the candle.
Galina comes home tomorrow. I must do some cleaning!
Cheers...
The first stop was Lobo Point, where Feht, Maria, and I had gone last Wednesday, and there were still no mushrooms to be seen, although everything (except, perhaps, the temperature) felt and looked right. I made a stop or two more on the way back to Pagosa, with similar results.
As I passed through town, I debated taking "the long way home" (40 miles instead of 6), along Four-Mile Road and then Plumtaw Road, which would bring me to Piedra Road and eventually back to my own neighborhood. In the end, I decided that even if I didn't see a single mushroom, it was an opportunity for me to expose myself to The Great Outdoors, and maybe learn something in the process.
After Plumtaw enters the National Forest, it starts to twist and turn like piece of well-cooked spaghetti. As I came around one turn, I surprised a huge brown bird - almost certainly a hawk or maybe even an eagle, judging from its size - that was drinking from a puddle, but which took off in quite a hurry as the Ford came around the bend. It lazily gained the top of a dead tree about 50 yards away, and I took a shot of it, cropped below.
I found exactly one Shaggy Mane mushroom along the entire 19-mile stretch of Plumtaw. This happens to be exactly the same number of Shaggies I found on a similar run down Plumtaw this past Monday, and both their number and condition are a subject of scientific curiosity for me.
The first curious thing was that these were individual Shaggies. This by itself is unusual, because, generally speaking, Shaggies hang out in squads, which is to say they "erupt" in small groups.
Second, although both individual specimens looked as if they had just popped out of the ground (photo below, left), their gills tell a different story (photo below, right)
The biology of the Shaggy (aka Coprinus comatus) is such that, soon after emerging from the ground, its gills start to turn pink, then gray, then black as the tissue progressively self-digests, eventually forming a black goop that resembles ink (which is why these mushrooms are also known as "Inky Caps"). The only way to check this process with harvested Shaggies is to cook them as soon as possible after getting home.
In any event, in my experience, a Shaggy that looks like the freshly-sprouted specimen above ought not to be in such an advanced state of self-digestion.
So I ask myself: What is going on? Is it the weather? Has it been too cold? Not wet enough? Is there some genetic memory at work here, in which the mycelia of local species have calculated - for whatever reason - that it's just not worth the effort to push out fruiting bodies this year?
As I came to the end of Plumtaw, I looked to my right and then stopped the car near the Debs School, a national historic site in the middle of nowhere, which was attended from 1909 to 1950 by local kids in grades 1-8. Across the road from the school was a really glorious panorama that the stitched shot below just hints at.
Despite the lack of mushrooms, the game was worth the candle.
Galina comes home tomorrow. I must do some cleaning!
Cheers...
