Mushrooms
Morel Season Opener
This is the very first morel mushroom my wife found this season. If you know my wife, you know she was very excited. She loves mushroom hunting even more than she loves eating them.
This is the first. It is early in the season and so it is also very tiny. The smaller photo is the same mushroom with my wife’s finger beside it to give you a better perspective.
This was found in the woodlands of northwest Missouri. We did not pick them – or the other two of similar stature found in the same area – because, well, they were just too small to bother. But just seeing them gets our hopes up for an abundant harvest this spring. We’ll see.
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Limited Shelf Life
On one of my recent hikes through the autumn woods, I snapped a brightly colored maple leaf that found a resting place on a shelf mushroom.
For those not familiar, shelf mushrooms (or bracket fungi) grow on the side of trees (living and dead). When you find them, they’re usually attached to rough barked trees.
There are dozens of shelf mushroom varieties – different sizes, shapes and colors. They are known by a variety of descriptive names – beefsteak fungus, sulphur shelf, birch bracket, dryad’s saddle, artist’s conk, and turkey tail…and others.
The classification, Polypores, is often used for the type of the hard or leathery fungi (like the one pictured here) that lacks a stem, growing straight out of wood. The polypore’s woody fruiting bodies are called conks.
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Spring Gathering
Hunting for morel mushrooms is a tradition of spring. Here are a nice batch found along a wooded path in northeast Wisconsin. There were actually two other morels in this pack, but I couldn’t fit them in the frame and still show the detail I wanted for this shot.
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Tree Dwellers
It was a banner year for mushrooms in northeast Wisconsin. An abundance of rainfall seemed to keep them sprouting up to, and even beyond, the first frosts.
I thought it was unusual to see so many mushrooms growing on a tree trunk. These healthy specimens were found in the woods of northeast Wisconsin.
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Mushrooms On Wood
On a hike through the autumn woods, I thought it was odd to find these mushrooms growing out of a fallen tree. (Or are they toad stools?) In any case, they intrigued me.
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Flock of Fungi
Our area received a lot of rain late summer to autumn. That provided favorable conditions for mushrooms. These are a just a few of the fungi bounty we discovered on a walk through Potawatomi Park near Sturgeon Bay, WI a few weeks ago.
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Blushing Couple
These two, brightly-colored mushrooms stood out on the forest floor. These are very tiny; much smaller than they seem in this photo.
With the unusual amount of rain we’ve been receiving, the woods had an abundance of mushrooms this fall. Quite a variety, too. I’ll be sharing more mushroom photos in the future.
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All of the photos I post are available for purchase. If you’d like to buy one, click on the blue “Buy this Online” bar below for a variety of print and frame options or contact me for digital purchase and licensing options.
Heavy Lifting Morels
These are morel mushrooms. I photographed them just as I found them. As you can see, they were growing in a rocky area. It seems, as they grew, they picked up a couple of stones between them. They remind me of a pair of hands with mittens reaching up from the rocks.
Morels are edible and highly prized by their culinary fans. My wife is a true fan…as in fanatic. Her passion lies as much (or more) in finding them than eating them. It’s hard to keep her out of the woods this time of year.
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Coral Fungi
This is unusual stuff. It’s a fresh bunch of coral fungi growing among the decaying mater on a N.E. Wisconsin forest floor.
Coral fungi is also commonly called club fungi. A more accurate name is clavarioid fungi. This type of fungi typically has erect, simple or branched basidiocarps (fruit bodies) that are formed on the ground, on decaying vegetation, or on dead wood.
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Fiery Fungi
This was a great find on the forest floor at Potawatomi State Park, near Sturgeon Bay on Wisconsin’s Door County peninsula. I don’t know what kind of mushroom this is, but it sure stood out among the dead pine needles and other decaying matter.
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