Nature Moncton Nature
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It’s mushroom day!
**Brian Stone joined Cathy
Simon at Irishtown Park on Sunday for a birding walk that quickly turned into a
mushroom walk as soon as they hit the trail. There was such a large variety of
fungi that their eyes barely left the ground as they walked the paths, mainly
the John Howard Trail, and Brian came home with so many fungi photos that his
selection to be processed contained 181 photos. All but a few photos were cell
phone captures, and crouching down and up, down and up, turned into a workout
that left Brian's lower half feeling like he had spent a week at the gym.
Brian selected a few mushroom
and fungi images from the large lineup that he was either familiar with or
found interesting to send along for viewing. Brian's identifications are mainly
Google's, so they are best guesses from the worldwide web and are open to
correction if wrong. Specimens sent include red-belted polypore,
varieties of coral fungus, varieties of puffball mushrooms, some
very tiny salmon-egg slime molds, wolf's milk slime molds, red
raspberry slime mold, false puffball slime mold, destroying angel mushrooms, a spiky
hedgehog mushroom, a shiny larch bolete, a small stump covered with
small pinewood gingertail mushrooms, and some scaly cap mushrooms
wedged in a tree trunk groove.
Dropbox link to all 181 of
the photos ...
**Nelson Poirier did a rerun
of Brian and Cathy’s hike on the John Howard Trail in Irishtown Nature Park on
Monday before the mushroom rain hit on Monday. Will only add a few more photos, as Brian
has done a yeoman job to put names on mushrooms that we only see in an
exceptional year like this one.
Nelson spoke with Gilles Leger
who has hiked this trail for many years and never saw anything near the
mushroom emergence that is present there this year.
The greatest abundance by
far of all species was the short-stemmed russula and the look-alike peppery
milkcap mushroom, which can be easily distinguished by breaking off a section
of the mushroom to see if it oozes the white latex of the peppery milkcap.
Another mushroom we do not often see was the wrinkled cort (formerly known as the gypsy mushroom),
which is considered a choice edible.
A photo shows a group of
mushrooms overlapping each other. When this happens, it is very helpful to cut
off the top mushrooms to see the colour of the spore print that has fallen on
the ones below.
Another photo shows why we
are not up to our waists in dead trees. Trees are essentially made up of
cellulose and lignin (bonding material). One type of fungus digests the
cellulose (brown rot) while another breaks down the lignin (white rot). This
recycling process provides the rich ground of the forest floor.
Nelson Poirier
Nature Moncton
