Rain brings out the Fungi, mould and some orchids

After the appalling dry of the last year March 2014 has brought measurable rain on 13 of the 28 days thus far.  Our total (still going up) is 65.2mm.  This has caused fungi to appear in fair profusion.  And a few other things.

To begin with the fungi.

These two rather adult-content-looking items were growing beside the Kambah Pool walk yesterday.  I wonder about Macrolepiota sp. but these were in a rather open area and from comments in Fuhrer that genus seems to favour forest.
I will take a punt that the next two images are Mycena sp. Top view ...
 .. and underside.
The next day (29/3/14) I snapped these at the start of Whiskers Creek Rd,
On the same date there were a couple of other species along the roadside:
This next is clearly a puffball, and I will take a punt on it being Pisolithus arhizus, the Horse Dung fungus.
This is clearly a bolete ...
 .. which rapidly stains blue when bruised.
I have included this revolting image of maggots as Fuhrer  says that Phlebotus is a favourite target of fungus flies being rapidly attacked.  This infestation occured 2 days after I first noticed the fungus
  I will pass completely on these next two specimens (3 images) .


When we took the dog for a walk at 7:30, still barely daylight, and humid but not yet raining, these white patches were very common along the upper creek.  However, my photo was garbage.
So I went back about 1500, when the light was better but it was raining.   I hardly found any of the organisms.  In the absence of any better ideas I will say they are some form of slime-mould!
I also found quite a few Eriochilus cucullatus: our first Autumn orchids!

Comments

Jeni at Northern Rivers Dreaming said…
Thanks so much for these photos. We just had exactly the same thing happen with a couple of Phlebotus we'd picked to photograph at home so we could identify them. We left them sitting on the bench outside and the next morning the cap of the larger one had entirely vanished under seething maggots. We're not going to get the stain out of the bench wood any time soon!
17 April 2014 at 09:07:00 GMT+10
Flabmeister said…
Insect damage is a general worry. Something got into tomatoes on a bench: fortunately the resulting soup dripped onto plastic. not the nearby furnishings.
17 April 2014 at 20:26:00 GMT+10
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A tour of the West (part 1)

Image
A friend from my time in the UN sent me some photos of her family trip along Route 66.  They did this is a large camperwagon rather than a Chevy Corvette (apparently the kids jacked up about being offered a trip in the trunk).  It seems to have been a very good trip for them and most interesting to see their photos.  It was also educational for me, as I found out the German for rocking chair (schaukelstuhl, since you ask). They did 7200 miles in 30 days - a pretty serious bit of distance. This made me think of the trips we did in 1981 when living in Denver.  Frances initiated that idea by getting a book about the National Parks of the West  and marking interesting places.  I then worked out a route on a Rand-McNally Road Atlas (GPS was unknown then  - as were iPhones, personal computers and the internet).  From memory, taking nearly the whole Summer school holidays we covered about 10,000 miles in 70 days.  Here, approximately,  are our routes: That map comes from Google Maps (G
Read more

Insects from pine trees

Image
This afternoon (13/1/2015) we were looking out of our sunroom and noticed a strange bit of mist.  On getting my binoculars on the case I found it to be a cloud of tens of thousand of insects.  They appeared with naked eye to be flying away, but with binoculars I thought they were circling. Here are some images In the second one it may be possible to see there are two streams coming from the top of each tree. There was a loud buzzing noise but that could just be several thousand wings. Earlier in the day Frances had been to some nearby willows and they were infested with many little black soft bodied insects.  Perhaps they shifted to the pines and were swarming? Help!! Any information welcome. A colleague, from Wamboin, had noticed a similat phenomenon, but involvng eucalypts rather than pines!  Here are the photos he took with his phone. I have consulted some expert friends.   Their responses were: I would have gone for chironomids. I recall years ago driving al
Read more

Satin Bowerbird gets ready for Lanigans Ball.

Image
Having some time to spare today I went to check the bower near "Tom Green's Seat" in the Australian National Botanic Gardens.  The bower was well occupied by what I take to be - based on the green plumage and yellow bill - a 5th or 6th year male Satin Bowerbird.  (With all these images, click on them for a bigger - unfortunately not better focused picture.  The shots were taken hand held on full zoom from about 10m distance into a fairly well shaded location.) He was very much engaged in adding to the construction. Then it seemed that another bird called from the bush above.  This led to a whole lot of activity: the most spectacular (and worst imaged) was a flash of the wings: The bird also did a fair bit of hopping around.  Given that it was still immature I called to mind the greatest traditional Irish song of all time: Diarmuid O'Leary and the Bards performing Lanigan's Ball .  This ditty refers to spending "6 long months at Brooks Academy learning
Read more