Week 3: Mushroom and Lichen Hunt!

Place: McCollum Park
Time: 2:05-3:35
Weather: Sunny! 
Temp: H 75, Low 63

Weekly Phenology Update:

You can kind of see how the ground plants grew a little taller and fuller, and the leaves in the background bushes became fuller.

The Sword fern grew taller and slightly fuller!

I forgot to document the 1 meter area last week, so I did some this week. I'm not exactly sure how big 1 meter is, but these spots would be interesting to follow.

Following the area behind and this tree! 1 meter.

1 meter picture. I will continue to document this area.

This Acer circinatum is sprouting more leaves. The leaves are droopy and there are yet to be any flowers underneath the leaves. Most are 9 lobed and have an opposite branching pattern. The wood is very flexible. I tripped over one as I was walking and it was hard and bent, but it didn't break. It just whipped back to place.

Vine Maple

This Atherium filix-femina is abundant in this area! Now that I can identify it, there is slightly less of this than Sword fern. Leaves are triangular and triple pinnated.

Lady fern!

Now, on to the mushroom/lichen hunt!

Last week I found a mushroom on a fallen wood log and posted it. 

Here's the before picture of the mushroom: 

You can see the gills of the mushroom well in this picture. They are long lines, and the outer side is smooth and creamy white. Very flexible. I'm pretty sure this is an Pleurotus ostreatus: the oyster mushroom. Its stems are absent and is saprobic (grow shelf-like clusters on dead logs). The cap is fan-shaped to kidney shaped. Margins are wavy and inrolled. The gills run down to the stem and are super close as a white/yellow color. The stem is absent (from what I observed). The flesh is thick and white, with an odor that is pungent but not bad. This is easily seen from far away, so the caps were pretty big.

Now here's this week's  picture:

It looks like a critter got to it, or a mushroom hunter. It is gregarious, lignoculous growing on a Red alder tree. The smell dissipated a little, but there was still a mushroomy smell coming from it.

According to my research, the four pictures below are also Oyster mushroom. It looks different, than the one above, but the descriptions fit. I also did a quick internet search and some oyster mushroom look like this. And they all smell the same.

It looks like the deadly Galerina or Psilocybe Cyanescens except it's NOT! There are no stems and it's not shiny/glossy/sticky or wet.  

The log looks like a nurse log, with bark breaking off everywhere.

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Here's a Hypogymnia inactiva, or Forking bone lichen. The lichen is hollow and tubular, with a white lobe at the tip and the inner color being a dark green/gray color. It's semi upright and medium sized with narrow lobes abour 2 mm wide. It was growing on a fallen branch of a Red alder. The lichen seems well grown in this coniferous forest area. It's been sunny lately, so the lichen could have thrived in the sunny warm weather. The bark was dry to touch, but not brittle, so there was some moisture to it. The ground was moist/wet though from the shade of the trees and the woody loading material covering the ground. The smaller debris the wood lichen was on was a mix of dry and wet twigs/leaves.  The area was in the open forest.

This lichen was growing on a branch that had fallen from the tree. It was laying on the ground with a 3.5-4 inch diameter at ~4 feet long. The branch was dry with a small percentage of moisture. The bark was an orange color on the inside. The soil it was lying on was moist, but not wet.

What the Forking bone was growing on. 

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Fomitopsis pinicola, or the Red belted polypore, is abundant on the trees in this forest. It is growing on a Douglas fir. It is a thick and woody mushroom that is tough to the touch. The surface top is red and orange colored, with occasional dark spots. The pore underneath is cream colored. It is saprobic on dead conifer wood (mostly snags; I found one growing on a live D. fir). It grows alone or with 2-3 other mushrooms. The cap is pretty wide across and deep. It's semicircular, convex and smooth. The pore surface is very small, but there are lots. The darker area in the picture directly below are the pores. There looks to be no stem and feels leathery and hard. It has a strong musky smell that is unpleasant for me. The area this mushroom was growing was in the shade, so I don't think the sun affected it greatly. It seems to do well in shaded and cool areas. It feeds on dead wood since most grow on snags. Most are high up, while some were close enough for me to touch.

Red belted polypore/ wood conk

Old Wood conk. Looks weird, but this is another form of the same mushroom.

Dried up Wood conk. This one is growing gregariously.

Someone tried the mushroom, but didn't like it. It looks burnt.

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Stereum ostrea: False turkey tail. 
I took pictures in different areasm but both are growing on dead wood. This one directly below is growing on a nurse log at the end, and it looks dried up and old. I touched it and it was floppy. The ends look as if it flaked off or was eaten. It could be dried up. The area this was in had the driest soil in the area. Everything was dry and brittle, except the log. So perhaps the sun dried the mushroom and made it crumbly.

The nurse log hosting the mushroom. You can see how the ground looks dry.

Different area: 

False turkey tail: Stereum ostrea. At first I thought it was a turkey tail because it looks like a clam/oyster shell. It was somewhat flexible and moved. But looking at the underside, the mushroom is white and smooth, with no noticeable pores. This is a false turkey tail. 

It is saprobic, living on dead hardwood and grows gregariously. There are gaps between the mushrooms so it's not fused together. It is fan shaped, kidney-shaped, smooth yet rough, semicircle, and has no stem. The colors are concentric zones with green and gray shades. Underneath is smooth and white/cream colored, The flesh is pretty tough, and there are a lot of flies around it. 

It was growing on a dead log with moss growing on it. The soil was very moist and it was growing in an area that usually has shade from the trees. It looks like the mushroom was growing for a while since it looks old, so it grew in the wet muddy weather. It's only been sunny recently and I know for a fact that these false turkey tails were here in the wet weather. It's kind of growing on its own near a few Western redcedar trees that provide it with shade. 

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However, I did find an actual Turkey Tail. It was difficult to take pictures of this without removing the mushroom, so I did the best I could and will identify what I observed. This Trametes versicolor is flexible, but it was also tough and leathery. I can see actual pores in the mushroom that are very tiny and abundant. When I touched it, it wasn't smooth, but had a slightly fuzzy texture. I'm pretty sure this is characteristic for the Turkey tail, but I'm not an expert. There is no odor coming from this.
The cap is circular and semicircle, kidney shaped, brown and red colored (for some).

It is growing on a Beaked hazelnut.

The Turkey tail looks fairly young and small. It's growing on a live tree/bush with moss covering the wood. It seems to grow well in the shade since the sun doesn't directly hit it. The soil wasn't dry, but it wasn't moist. The soil was moist, but slightly brittle. 

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 This is a Platismatia herrei, or Tattered rag lichen. It's a pale green with white on top, elongated narrow lobes with marginal isidia (shiny). Top surface is white/green/gray and bottom surface is white with brown spots. It's somewhat erect but drooping off substrate. The lobes aren't far apart. This area was dry, as the smaller twigs were more dry and brittle than the other lichen I found up above. This lichen felt dry and brittle, so I think it got sundried. It was crispy due to the recent sunny hot weather. It also grew in the open forest in low elevation in a coniferous forest.