September 22, 2019: Fall Fungi Fest

It's time for the annual mushroom festival.  The predictions way back in June were for a good mushroom crop due to the wet spring with abundant rain, and it appears to have been accurate.  Some fungi started appearing earlier in the summer, but they really started to kick in around late August.  All the samples below sprouted since August 23rd, with the earliest being the chicken mushroom I posted on September first.

Chicken mushroom, or sulphur shelf

My respect for mushrooms grew a lot when I came to understand that essentially no tree in the forest would exist without fungi to provide essential nutrients to the tree's roots.  And it increased further when I learned that the visible mushroom is just the fruit of a giant organism growing underground.  I'ts like a giant underground apple tree which just sticks it fruit up above ground to let its seeds (in this case, spores) be distributed.  I'll include my best idea as to the identity of any mushrooms I'm willing to take a guess at.

I always marvel at the variety of these interesting and important organisms.

Tiny ones

Purple ones (viscid violet webcap)

Small families

And large families

I love how they can push up through the ground and leaf litter.

Fly amanita

They're often consumed by various animals.

Usually I see little nibbles taken with lots of crumbs left on the ground.  But this looks like some large animal took a couple of big bites.  But who?

Some mushrooms can grow quite rapidly.  Here's a series of pictures of the same fruits I took over the course of several day.

September 9th

September 11th

September 12th

September 15th

And finally, to close out fungi fest 2019, a cute little family of mushrooms that could star in a performance of Fantasia.