🍄Ipsissimus🍁Mocata🍄

A high-contrast B&W, wide-angle photo of a California buckeye shrub (or small tree, depending on how you draw the line). The convoluted tangle of branches are a stark whites and light greys against a nearly black forest floor, with only a small portion of white sky visible near the top of the frame.

It isn’t quite time yet for Aesculus californica to be leafing out, but I do love seeing its silvery branches in the winter when they’re doing their best to look like an indecipherable metal logo.

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Collage från Konserthuset YouTube video by Fläsket brinner - Topic

A 10-minute monster performance of Fläsket Brinner playing (when Bo Hansson still in the band!) at the Stockholms Konserthus back when they were supporting the Mothers of Invention in late 1970. Krautrock-levels of hypnotic repetition building to fiery intensity!

m.youtube.com/watch?v=vSL0...

Growing out of the rough-barked trunk of a dead Quercus lobata is Hericium erinaceus, a “lion’s mane mushroom”. Its fruiting body is a dense cluster of hundreds of downward-dangling soft “spines”, and is a cream white color with touches of light brown on the more aged portions at the top.

Fav fungal finds of 2025, vol. 6: Hericium erinaceus. A real treat to see this one show up growing right in my own yard again, just in time for a holiday feast!

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Over a flooded field, thousands of snow geese take off in a highly dense flock, their white feathers yellowish in the evening sun.

While not the greatest of photos from a technical standpoint due to not having any time to align my phone with the binoculars any better, but this does, at the very least, give a good idea of just how ridiculously dense that flock of geese was.

Literally the first thing I thought when I saw it happen was “I’ll bet Hollie would love this…”

“Just a few” snow geese taking off after a bald eagle made a low pass over the flooded fields down in the Central Valley.

[Oh look, it’s me forgetting to tag posts to show up in the Fungi Friends feed again. I’ve been away half a year; I’m sure I’ll remember more consistently again soon enough…]
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Against the rough, greyish-brown bark of Pinus ponderosa is a cluster of four young mushrooms of varying sizes. The entire basidiocarps are a rich golden yellow with a brownish fibrillose texture. The caps have an inrolled margin with a cottony partial veil.

Fav fungal finds of 2025, vol. 5: Gymnopilus ventricosus. A related east-coast species, G. subspectabilis (the so-called “Big Laughing Gym”), is psychoactive, but this west-coast counterpart apparently is not. It is, however, supposed to be a great mushroom for making a gold-colored fabric dye.

Ugh. Fingers crossed that this situation resolves itself “Dicky from ‘The Beyond’”-style.

Ah! Well some of the upcoming ones I found might be more up your street, then: Lactarius has an un-mushroomlike texture more like a firm artichoke heart, and my sister and I battered & fried some Laetiporus and it was astonishingly close in texture to chicken tenders!

It’s so weird in that it’s *specifically* frozen OJ concentrate rather than just a generic orange scent. Its flavor is nothing like that, though, as the scent and color sadly disappears when cooked, so if you aren’t a fan of the classic mushroom flavor, this one probably won’t make you a convert.

Against a background of decaying oak leaves and pine needles is a lilac-colored mushroom. Its gills are the most vibrant purple, with its smooth cap a slightly warmer hue and its stipe a cooler and paler tone.

Fav fungi of 2025, Vol. 4: Collybia nuda. It’s not in Clitocybe anymore, but with that vibrant purple and a distinctive scent which somehow smells EXACTLY like opening up a can of Minute Maid frozen orange juice concentrate, there’s no mistaking it for anything but a blewit. Quite tasty, too!

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Bad Acid "Amnesia Haze" YouTube video by MrStonebeliever

The random wheel has just been spun again and it gave us… the Swedish stoner rock group Bad Acid. I kind of forgot this band existed, as they only put out this one album a decade ago before calling it quits, and other things caught my fancy more that year, but I think I’ll give it a revisit it now.

Father Figure by George Michael YouTube video by Guts Club - Topic

The unexpected best cover song of 2025.

m.youtube.com/watch?v=N5Jo...

From a forest floor consisting of a mix of decaying wood and other dead vegetation is a tight cluster of numerous thin, white, club-like basidiocarps, some with the occasional little fork at the end like the antler of a young buck, but never fully branched out into many tips. They’re almost totally opaque, but have just a little touch of transparency to them in thinner areas that make them look like they’re made of milk glass. One cluster of dozens stands erect and packed together, while a second smaller cluster curves out and upward in a jaunty fashion.

Another from the 2025 fungal retrospective: Clavaria fragilis, a ghostly white little saprobe with the charming colloquial name of “fairy fingers”.

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I can still hear at least ¾ of these in my head on sight of the title, as it was VERY much the prime of my commercial FM radio listening days before I found file-sharing & college radio! Plenty that I thought were just fine, but these post-grunge years got rapidly worse, esp. when nü-metal arrived.

All of this rain certainly has Deer Creek looking rather vigorous.

A Stropharia ambigua mushroom growing next to a blackberry plant. Its stipe is white, floccose, and sinuously curved. Its umbonate pileus is the pale, warm yellow color of a Meyer lemon and is lightly viscid. The margin of the cap is fringed with dangling white remnants of the partial veil, like frosting icicles on a gingerbread house. Its gills are a purplish grey with lighter edges. The three leaves of the blackberry (Rubus armeniacus) to its left are a much paler yellow (less Meyer lemon and more lemon chiffon pie) with green radiating from their veins. The ground is covered in the leaves and needles of Quercus kelloggii and Pinus ponderosa.

Next up in the look back at this season’s favorites: good ol’ Stropharia ambigua. Between their color, form, size, and sheer numbers, these never disappoint.

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I *almost* made it through this week without getting Shadow’s title theme for ‘New Year’s Evil’ stuck in my head, but it managed to sneak up on me on the last day and that riff has been firmly wedged in there ever since.

A large Amanita mushroom emerges from the forest floor. Its pileus is an ochreous tan fading to dull gold at the prominently striated margin. This is capped with a solid white patch of its universal veil on top, like a fresh snowfall on a well-rounded hill. The stipe is a cream color with a somewhat shaggy veil, and is growing out of a large, free volva.

Another large Amanita mushroom emerges from the forest floor again, viewed from a lower angle. Its pileus is a light ochreous brown fading to dull gold at the margin, which is somewhat less prominently striated than the first picture, as this one is a bit younger. The veil remnant on top is not visible from this angle, but you can see the gills, which are a pristine white. Its stipe is similarly bright white, with a ruffled double annulus. The volva at the base is just barely visible, but is mostly submerged in the soil.

My low-effort resolution this year was to start posting over here again, so… I’m back! Apologies to anyone who follows me elsewhere for the re-runs, but I figured I’d share a few of my favorite mushrooms I’ve encountered over my absence.

Kicking things off: Amanita calyptroderma!

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Halloween was good here! I kept planning on returning here, but you know how that goes. Soon (I SWEAR!), I’ll be back with a big fat backlog of photos to post, as well as what I watched this spooky season.

Haha, that was originally a XXX feature called ‘ Devil’s Due’, but I did source it from the JX Williams version! Someone should make a Geocities page that IDs all the various movies that JXW drew from, like that ancient page that figured out every single clip used in Skinny Puppy’s “Worlock” video.

Thank you! I can’t wait for the Pacific tree frogs to start seeking shelter under my loose bark.

An informative plaque shows what happens to a tree after it dies, in a process called “The Snag Cycle”. It begins with a freshly deceased tree (“The snag”), followed by “Bark falling off”, then “Snag breaking down”, “The snag has fallen”, and finally, “The stump”.

As of yesterday, I have officially reached the “Breaking Down” stage of the Snag Cycle. Yay for 40, I guess?

I always called them Otter Pops regardless of if they’re off-brand. The secret is that the knock-off “Helados Fun Pops” version is WAY better than the real name brand. Superior flavors, and they melt into a more satisfying slushy texture compared to real Otter Pops, which melt more like a popsicle.

A honeybee perches on the black disc florets of a “Midnight Rouge” sunflower. Its ray florets are burgundy red with a proximal burst of golden yellow.

Pollinator time out in the garden. I know it’s a rare thing for me to be posting something cultivated, but with a bloom like that, I couldn’t resist.

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Same here! I always love monotypic stuff, especially when it’s family level or above. Whenever I see one, it’s like “Hell yeah — you keep doing your own thing, ya little weirdo!”.

It’s the only member of Paeoniaceae in my area, so the first time I saw one, the weird morphology really threw me for a loop! According to this paper, it’s primarily pollinated by wasps, Syrphid flies, and sweat bees, although I did see a fat bumblebee rather awkwardly clinging upsidedown to one.

Against a background of dried Pinus ponderosa needles and a few incised, celadon-green leaves from the plant itself, is the upturned flower of a Western Peony. It has eight petals which fade in color from white proximally, to brick red centrally, to a dull, faintly greenish yellow distally. At the center of the flower is a ring of a dozen or so little green lines with three large, green, almond-shaped carpels emerging from the center of them. If that wasn’t enough, it finally takes thing completely over the top by having a profusion of dozens of bright yellow stamens shooting out in a ring around the outside of the lobes.

Paeonia brownii. These native peonies have such striking flowers, yet they can be easy to miss while walking down a trail, as the flowers face downward, showing only hints of burgundy petals from the side. If you you flip them over like this, however, they are quite a sight to behold!

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Against a background of Quercus chrysolepis debris is an “early morel”, which isn’t truly a proper morel at all, as its cap is freely connected. The pileus is brown, campanulate, not wrinkled like a true morel, and is relatively small in proportion to its long, thick, cream-colored stipe.

A fungal flashback from earlier in the year: Verpa conica, a not-quite-a-morel in Morchellaceae.

Quit giggling at the back of the class — it looks like a daikon radish wearing a cloche and *certainly* not like anything else.

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