Shots of the Day - # 21 - Mushrooms

The season is changing. Around here, there are times in the early fall when we get a good soaking rain followed by the cool and dry conditions that make the fungus-among-us go bananas. Around this time in 2006, the woods behind the house just bloomed with brackets, puffballs and mushrooms.

Glowing Parasols (5 October 2006)

While we live in a typical, 34-year-old cul-de-sac development, we are fortunate to be on the edge of a lowland hardwood forest that is, thankfully, too wet to develop. In the first full year of this blog, I waxed poetic on the Joys of Four Seasons with images of a stream in our woods.

On a nice autumn day in 2006, I packed the tripod to take longer exposures and increase the depth of field so more of the scene would be in focus. However, sometimes I just used the pop-up flash. This can sometimes give the subjects an eerie quality.

Puffballs on a Fallen Log (5 October 2006)

Puffballs don’t have stalks like common mushrooms. Instead of dropping their reproductive spores from the underside of the cap, these puffballs, with the slightest touch on their delicate sides, will blow spores into the air. Any creature that brushes against this log or any branch that falls on it will release a cloud of reproductive material that will settle somewhere else and start a new phase of puffball life.

Bracket Fungi on a Fallen Log (5 October 2006)

If the puffballs don’t get you, the brackets will. Here is another fallen tree doing its part to provide substrate for our fungal friends. They may not be the most exciting or glamorous of nature’s subjects, but the decomposers are essential players in the cycle of life. They reduce larger biomass to forms that other creatures can utilize. Eventually, a big, dead tree will become nutrients and soil on which the next big tree will grow.