There have been reports of Striped Coralroot recently so I will repost this story from April of last year.
There is a group of wildflowers that have learned how to cheat photosynthesis. This allows them to simplify physical structure and eliminate the work of making chlorophyll and their own food. It confers a significant survival advantage in low-light forest conditions.
We have been having a bonus year for mushrooms and fungi in our area. I will add some photos from two recent trips that I have taken. The first will be from October 8 when I visited McConnell Lake in the rain and the second will be from The KNC field trip on October 14 led by Gary Hunt to the Scuitto Lake Forest Service Road south of Barnhartvale. For many species, I won’t have names or if I do, they need to be verified by an expert, so it … Continue reading →
The wet fall has certainly been a boon to mushroom enthusiasts, especially in the Douglas Fir forests and above. I have even seen mushrooms sprouting in our driest grasslands. While I am not very experienced at identifying mushrooms and related organisms, I have been fortunate to have the kindly guidance of Gary Hunt from our club as well as Jim Ginns, polypore expert from the Okanagan to put some names to some of the mushrooms found in this article. Some will remain unnamed because my photos do not show the … Continue reading →
While hiking the Park Hill Trails near Canoe, we spotted a number of wildlfowers and fungi in the forest. A gallery of images can be found at this link: On the Park Hill Trails
Continue reading →Welcome to Mushroom Monday for April 30, 2018 With the recent appearance of a few species of ink cap mushrooms, we can expect to see them through the summer and fall. The big majority of ink cap mushrooms (called the coprinoid fungi) share the unusual feature of having gills that digest themselves at maturity producing a liquid mass of black spores. Some of the liquid drips to the ground and infiltrates the soil and some dries on the mushroom cap and is wind dispersed. If insects land on the liquid … Continue reading →
Welcome to Mushroom Monday for April 23, 2018 The cup fungi are a wide-spread and variable group of cup-shaped mushrooms. The most conspicuous ones are often colourful. There are hundreds of species with many being hard to identify and requiring microscopic features to determine species. No guide book attempts to cover them all so be happy if you can arrive at a genus name. Spores are produced on the inner surface of the cup and are often released in a visible cloud-like puff. Many are found on burned ground and … Continue reading →