Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Fairy Garden of Fun Fungi

The rains came. We had record rainfall in the wake of Hurricanes Gustav and Ike, although no personal flooding in our home. Oak Creek, at the bottom of our ravine, was overflowing and dark brown.

The damp earth produces a fairy forest of toadstools in our mulched beds. There are several hundred on this cool damp morning. By 9 a.m. they are all shriveled.
Beautiful, aren't they? I made a feeble attempt at indentification but gave up. If anyone knows what these are, please let me know. I am not planning on eating them, just curious.





Those are tiny fungi in the center of the photo, about 1/4 the size of a pencil eraser.
Even better than the fungus: I saw a pileated woodpecker today outside our porch windows! I first heard it's call and raced to the window just in time to see this prehistoric-looking beauty scuttling on the trunk of a maple tree. My camera wasn't too far away but I didn't want to risk precious time viewing the bird. I had a feeling the pileated woodpeckers lived in this woods but we had not seen one until now.

3 comments:

Robert McEvily said...

Thanks for the interesting photos. (Not sure what they are myself.)

KPiep said...

Those are beautiful! We've also had a ton of rain, but the toadstools it produced here were of the gigantic, rather unappealing variety.

joyknits said...

Love your tiny ones - ours have mostly been of the larger persuasion. Check my blog - I gave you a Blue Ribbon!

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