Mushrooms - 11/26

I had to get around to these guys eventually, and some boletes growing out in the yard were the push I needed. All of these phots to sort through!  I hopped online and found the Puget Sound Mycological Society, and (of course) blasted them with 20 images at once. The autoreply came back letting the mushroomID user that they are swamped right now, and as such, they need two things: 1) Try to figure it out before you send a request, and 2) Send one at a time. 

It's been interesting to cull through the images, and I thankfully got a lot of them with stems, gills, and caps taken from different angles. So I'm going to spend some time making an honest ID effort here, and will type it up once I figure it out or get stuck. 

1. Fly Agaric

I went out the day after a good rain up to Echo Mountain and came across these guys. Same species of mushroom, apparently! The bottom one seems to be Yellow Fly Agaric - there are many subspecies. I am waiting to hear about the top one. These are the classic toadstool mushrooms, and are quite universally as toxic as one would expect. 

Amanita muscaria is what I was going with, just based on pictures, but I did get a response on these from the PSMS - A. muscaria is seen around here, but is European, and more likely to show up around imported plants, where it is seen rarely. Amanita chrysoblema is our local one, very common, and found near native plants. This is what the DNA is telling people, even if 99 percent of the field guides would not tell us that. . . yet!

2. Giant Funnel Cap

I didn't check this one, but it's giant.... it's a funnel... it's white... and the stem details looked similar to what I saw on an identification site. Apparently they are edible, although goodness, I'm not pushing my luck with any of these! They do stand out, so if I see one in the future, it would go through a more rigorous ID, and a second or third opinion. It was just fun to find something that big.

3. Turkey Tail Mushroom

This one was fun - a pretty common bracket fungus that lives up to its name, looking like a fanned out tail. 

4. "Did it smell like cucumbers?"

Hm?

This was the question I got to help narrow it down. This. . . is exactly why I started this nonsense. I mean. Not just cucumber smells, but because of the deep dive it would take to identify some of the things over the course of the year. It gives me a window into the world of people who *know this kind of stuff*. I will smell my little brown mushrooms from now on, and I may even try to do a spore print, but . . . yowzers, I got 5 mushrooms in before falling over this cliff. 

I am unlikely to become a serious mushroom person, but I want to be able to speak their language at least a little. 

To be continued. . . 

A Few Months of Moths

 

A Lucky Find

This particular moth may or may not have been a lucky find. I couldn't get it identified beyond the geometer moth family. My real lucky find was www.butterflyidentification.org. I was just putzing around trying to identify some of my finds, and coming up empty. I shot them an email with 8 images, and they responded back with some great help. 

Sure, a few of them, they needed more details - like the one above - but some others ended up being identifiable. 

White-striped Black Moth

Apparently, this little guy is also from the geometer moths. It was found at Snoqualmie Pass in July just as I started up the ski hill trail. 

Divided Olethreutes Moth

Same hike, a little farther up the hill. This was a puzzling pic, because of the lighting, which makes it look a little blue! This moth is in the leafroller family.

Western Tent-Caterpillar

You know these caterpillars! In some summers, we get crazy outbreaks of these, and they can completely devour the foliage off of plants. It sounds like more often than not, trees rebound well enough from the infestation - that was my experience when I had them on my property in some arbor vitaes. It would have been a weird year if I hadn't seen these. . . not that this hasn't been a weird year!

Single-dotted Wave Moth

And the final moth for the list - a Single-dotted Wave Moth. This is another geometer moth, which seems to make sense, as geometers are a huge family. Hopefully I'll have some opportunities to find a few more families as I move along with this. 

There's still a little backlog of flowers and mushrooms to get through, and it's a rainy fall day right now... so hopefully I'll be adding more soon!

Spider Season and other goings-on

Excuses for these three months? Car problems, COVID, and a crazy lot of writing work. No time, restricted life, and no way to get around with the free time that would arise. So I've been making mental notes, and getting pictures here and there, and finally am getting around to adding it all to the list. 

Spiders first. I'm not all that scared of spiders, but. . . I woke up to a Giant House Spider on my wall. This killed a couple hours of my day, in part because I have seen one before. The Giant House Spider is like... 5 inches across. That's fine. I have no worries about that, and comfortably believe that they are not a threat to people. All of these things I can state and believe.

They also happen to be the fastest spider in the world. 

That's the kind of information that the brain doesn't really need. I sat there and looked up at this thing wondering. . . how does that fact translate into my life at this moment? If I try to kill or remove this spider, is there going to be a flurry of spidering that I'm just not ready for?? So my options were 1) just kill it and be done with it 2) just put it into some Tupperware and walk it outside and be done with it, or 3) leave... and come back and wonder where it went, or 4) sit and watch for the rest of eternity.

I tried plan 4 for a bit, but eventually gave in. Plan 2, phase 2a was to send an exploratory poke up towards the spider to see what fast looked like before actually trying to catch it. He (I assume, based on my reading of September spiders) dropped to the ground and ran. . . at 1/498750439872 the speed my brain had imagined. I got him into some Tupperware and out to the yard. I felt good about it but was given layers of doubt afterwards. "You may as well have killed it. They live in houses - it won't make it." but then I also read that it was invasive (and when is that ever good?). So in the end, I don't know what happened to the guy, or even what my hopes for him were.

Other stuff:

Narrow-collared Snail-eating Beetle

Wow. This was kind of a fun find! Not only was it pretty easy to identify, but. . . it is doing its job in the picture, chomping away on a poor slug.

What is this??

I ask, because I found two different species that looked pretty good. Carolina Locust, and Bird Grasshopper.

An image of the locust: 

credit noted - snipped from insectidentifcation.org

There's a lot to like about the comparisons here - they are very similar in color and structure. Nothing jumped out that was obviously off and that shows in both pictures really well. 

Bird Grasshoppers:

This is attributed to "Karen" on whatsthatbug.com. It's so similar, although the little loops on the legs are pretty prominent in every picture I saw for this species (and many of the pictures looked very different from this one!), so I am inclined to think that it was a Carolina Locust. The habitat also matches up - my picture was taken along a dry powerline cut, which was almost exactly what most sites considered prime habitat for this widespread bug.

Boreal Bluet

I did make a run up to Snoqualmie Pass (just inside the 425!) for a July hike. There will be many other pictures to sort through, but this one was a fun find: A Boreal Bluet! This is a damselfly found at high elevations in the Cascades, and it stayed still long enough for me to get 10 bad pictures and this pretty passable one.

For the identification, I want to azdragonflies.com, and found this: 

The bar is tough to see, but all other markings matched up well. Other bluets are so similar - it took a few rounds of looking through them to settle on this.

Firefly?

No picture, sorry! Hiking at Squak Mountain, I saw this little guy. My friend snapped a picture and used an app to identify it as a firefly. I asked for it later, and he'd deleted it, because it "wasn't a great picture". (He needs to see the images in this blog!). I was surprised to hear that there are absolutely fireflies in the Pacific Northwest - they just don't glow! Ellychnia is the genus, but there are many species within, and I couldn't have made a guess just from my recollection of the beetle.

Updates have me at 205. . . but there's actually quite a few flowers and fungi to get through. 425 is going to be a stretch at this point, but it will be fun to push it and see what I can find!

Echo Mountain again, of course.

It's been hard to get out, and Echo Mountain has been a good option this week when I've had an hour to escape. It's off of 196th, which runs from Petrovitsky to the Maple Valley Highway. Spring Lake Park has a little parking area for it, and it is maintained by King County.

The trails here are pretty extensive, and I've actually gotten lost once. I walked up to the peak, and thought I was following a clever way back. . . but ended up on the other side of the mountain! It gets pretty wild as you move off towards the Maple Valley Highway, and morphs into an open space. I've loved this spot because it's one of the more pristine places nearby. The birds shift: from crow to raven (heard one today), from house finch to purple finches (and red crossbills today).

It's also a place where I have had Northern Pygmy-Owls kind of regularly (if twice out of three attempts can count). And today there were Barred Owls.

Appears to be a juvenile top and adult at bottom

I did this a little backwards, as this was the end of the walk, not the start, but it was just fun to actually get to see them. Fun. . . outside of the hissing noises and threatening looks. I moved along.

My real reason for getting up Echo Mountain is that the top has been noted as a place that holds some rare plant species. I went up blindly thinking I would just take some pictures and figure out what I was seeing!

On the way up, I got heavily distracted by things that I did recognize: trailing blackberry, thimbleberry, wild red huckleberry, and finally... salal!  I just need to get a salal pie now. . . challenging in part because you really have to pick them from the stem. Nearly any other berry, you grab the berry and get all you want. With salal, this results in the berry kind of sliiiiding off of a sleeve, and it's just not the same. This is a native plant that was used as an important food source. I am going to start gathering them for my morning yogurt, and for drying if I can get enough of them!

Salal

Well...I'm still working on the pictures. I had a few times where I just took the shot, and thought that it had come out a little sharper than it had. But still there should be some guesses for these guys. Cross checking against plants that the local native plant people have noted up at the top.

So... I now look at the note from the native plant society...

"In late April a fine assortment of plants should be in bloom. Chocolate lilies (Fritillaria affinis), deer's tongue (Erythronium oregonum), two species of wild strawberries (Fragaria vesca and virginiana), native self-heal (Prunella vulgaris) underneath a blanket of serviceberry (Amelanchier alnifolia); and growing on the steep, seepy, mossy rock faces two species of monkey flower (Mimulus guttatus and alsinoides), goldback fern (Pentagramma triangularis), maidenhair spleenwort (Asplenium trichomanes), and Wallace's selaginella (Selaginella wallacei). Later in May the mountaintop turns pink with sea blush (Plectritis congesta) and in June a big bloom of fool's onion (Triteleia hyacinthina). On the 1 mile trail to the summit look for slender toothwort (Cardamine nuttallii) and sweet cicely (Osmorhiza chilensis), along with a full complement of our lowland forest species. On the return you can take a trailless route to a nice bog/fen complex with Sphagnum spp., bog laurel (Kalmia occidentalis), Labrador tea (Rhododendron groenlandicum), wild cranberry (Vaccinium oxycoccos), and of course some fine Carices."

and then I look at the calendar, and see that it is June. . . and apply the palm to the face. But why not look up some of the plants that were in bloom a month ago... just in case.

Native self-heal

Ha! One, anyway. This one is one I had seen around so often, I just hadn't registered it as rare. . . or identified it!  It is a native, and considered a yard weed. The name comes because it can be used for throat ailments. 

Chocolate lilies, no. Serviceberry... I feel dumb now, because I feel like I've seen it around? No monkeyflowers... I had actually hoped to find them! 

Goldback fern - obviously I have to go back and look for it. Ferns stick around. I'm guessing the same is true for. . . spleenwort? what's a spleenwort??

Wallace's sela... slage... that stuff looks familiar, and I'll look more carefully as well. I just figured mossy stuff I would never identify. But is that even a moss? Lycophytes are... something I'll read about. Sea blush and fool's onion, no, and no.

Slender toothwort and sweet cicely are a maybe. Not ones I got pictures of. 

What did I shoot?

1.

Well, there was this low-grower with delicate white flowers. This will be some research. . . Other pictures were meh, but this one I feel like figuring out for sure.

Also on the walk:

snaaaaaaake!

Puget sound garter snake. I may have had this one before... but this "counts" for sure.

Three months??

Good news and bad news

COVID has made it an interesting few months. Good news that I stayed very busy throughout, bad news that I was too busy to work on the blog at all, but good news that keeping busy has finally allowed me to replace a stolen camera.

I had free time to get out to Echo Mountain today - not even the whole thing, as I had a morning Zoom call, but a little bit of rain had brought out some good targets for the new camera:

Slugs!

. . . and a snail. I almost struck out on snails, but did find one near the end. I started this post thinking "Certainly. . . certainly I'll be able to identify my little mollusk friends from the pictures today. . ." Here's hoping.

This will serve as my guide.  It's for Oregon, which should be fine, right...?  And it's set up like a dichotomous key for the most part.

1. 

This. . . is a slug

That was question 1:  Shell or no shell (NO)

Question 2: Where's the pneumostome placed on the mantle:  Huh?

Oh! erm. . . on the front part.

Question 3: Ovoid tubercules and a caudal pore, or diamond shaped tubercules and no caudal pore?

Looking like the first one on Slug #1

This gets us to the roundback slugs: arions. Only one black one in the bunch: Arion hortensis, or a Garden Arion. Although, to be fair, they mention that there are many other species, and a dissection is needed to confirm. . . yaknow, that's not happening!  This was enough to identify it as an introduced species from Europe. I will likely enter it in as A. hortensis, but count no other black roundbacks as a new species. 

2. 

Arion sp?

Same answers here, but we end up with a slightly different color. It could be A. rufus, which is a red or chocolate arion, although this one sure seemed redder...

3.

Arion rufus - red arion

With some research, I might get 2 figured out, but I like the ID for 3.  I also liked watching him (her? both?) eat:

chomp, chomp chomp

4.

It's hard to see the pneumostoma on this one, but this turned out to be a banana slug. Turns out it is a variable species, because these other ones were banana slugs too:

Ariolimax columbianus - Banana Slugs!

The picture that helped here was this:

And then I had the one snail: 

Pacific Sideband Snail - Monadenia fidelis.

This was another native.

Off to work updating the list. I'm about 150 days in so I should be around 150 species to be "on pace" with all of this. There's definitely some wildflowers waiting for me! I got out on a hike near Rainier recently, although that is decidedly out of the 425!

Addendum:

This went into the yogurt at breakfast the other day. The blackberries are the better, native blackberries - Rubus ursinus, which I found ripe in a little patch. The smooshy ones are Thimbleberry, which is so delicious, but a little seedy. The round red ones are Wild Red Huckleberry, which are romantically my favorite local berry. And finally, the light blue/purple ones. . . Oregon Grape! Oregon Grape is not something where you'd eat a handful of them, but adding them to this mix was not unwelcome.

Trailing Blackberry! Sorry, but you'll have to find your own patch.

4/20 Just the plants

Hey where'd ya go?

Into isolation. Virus or no virus, there was other writing to be done, and no days where it was justifiable to set things aside for the Blog of the Things. During that month, some birds have arrived, the bugs woke up, the frogs started singing, and we even had Worm Moon, complete with robins tugging worms out of the soil.

But I'm going to focus on the plants, because they have been popping up, putting out some buds and flowers. All of these, unless otherwise noted, are just from out my door and into the Renton Natural Area. 

We aren't family

It has struck me, as I have been taking in all of these flowering plants, how many of them aren't in the same family. I enjoy a good pattern (Oh look, these two are in the same family because they both _____!), but the pattern that has been thrown at me is that there are a dang lot of families of flowering plants. 

Out of fairness: 

Before launching into the different families of plants I've run into with singletons here and there, it's worth noting that two families have had some multiples: 

The Heathers: Salal and Rhododendron

I know, there are supposed to be three Heathers. If I could tell one rhodie from another, we might be there. Sorry! 

Rhododendron, our state flower. The leaves are apparently edible for something, just not us.

Salal! It doesn't look like much now, but there will be yummy berries in the summer.

The Roses: Douglas's Spirea, Indian Plum, Salmonberry, and Himalaya Blackberry

This family came in with a whopping four members! Douglas's Spirea, affectionately known as Hardhack: 

There will be pink flowers everywhere in the summer. 

One of the earliest bloomers, Indian Plum, was shown earlier. I actually found some of it with fruits at Black River Riparian Forest: 

I guess those are Osoberries hanging in that cluster. 

Salmonberry and Himalaya Blackberry have been familiar to me for much longer. Salmonberry has been blooming - again a picture from Black River: 

To be fair, there have been some honest-to-goodness roses as well. I just found out that there are multiple native species, so I will wait to add them to the list until I actually identify them!

The asparagus family: False Lily of the Valley

I kid you not. Somehow this is related to asparagus: 

The flowers it will send up will help make sense of this fact. They are kind of sort of little stalks. I will try not to highlight this fact too many times, but. . . There's so much of this stuff everywhere, and I didn't know what it was until a week or two ago. The mission has been a success so far!

The gooseberry family: Red-flowering Currant

I was so excited when I learned that this was red currant! Then I learned that it's just the flowers that are red, and that the purple berries are not all that tasty. . . Learning is not always as fun as people make it out to be. At any rate, it is blooming all over the place in early April, and is part of why the hummingbirds make their return right around then. 

Bunchflower family: Pacific Trillium (Western Wakerobin)

This one gets to be bigger, because A) it's not out of focus, and 2) it's such a gorgeous thing. There are more on the way, but this one bloomed really early, and always gave me something to look forward to on my walks. 

The Mint family: Red Dead Nettle

Oh! That's what that stuff is called. This is everywhere. I've eaten it. Don't worry, the "dead" part is because, despite looking a little like stinging nettles, there's no sting.

Sunflower family: Nipplewort

Not just edible, but actually kind of tasty. I have seen this stuff in quite a few places now, but never in huge quantities. Far from flowering right now. Apparently, the name comes from a medicinal use - it helps stop the flow of milk after breast-feeding. 

Geranium family: Herb Robert (Stinky Bob)   

This was the biggest disappointment of all. I always wanted to know what these beautiful little pink flowers were. I searched and searched through native plant databases, certain that I was describing it well enough. Well, it's not native. And it's not cute. It is Stinky Bob, destroyer of ecosystems. I see it everywhere because the stuff spreads some exceptionally hearty seeds out into the world, and pushes everything else out of the way. 

And the leaves taste like parsley. Invasivores, go ahead and have a field day on this one.

Poppy family: Western Bleeding-Heart 

These certainly aren't struggling to survive. Where there's a patch, there's a huge patch blooming right now. Pink/purple drooping flowers. 

Barberries: Oregon Grape 

This is in the Stinky Bob picture above. I've been surprised to see some quite tall versions of this plant. The leaves are edible. I know what you're thinking. Something like "gross." The leaves are, by and large, rough and pokey. Any week, however, they will start to push out some yellow/orange growth of new leaves, which have an interesting flavor. 

Please research the heck out of any of this before picking and eating anything. I have tried to be pretty thorough before I have a taste of anything!

Have to stop there for the day, but Stinging Nettle... we'll have a talk about Stinging Nettles soon. 

Things are flowering as we speak. Gotta go!

3/11 - 100: Spinus Pinus

Pete's bird

A good birding friend of mine passed a few years back. My son and I attended the memorial, and as we walked out of the church one last time with Pete, a flock of Pine Siskins erupted from one of the trees.

These are a species of finch, and finches are a hit or miss species from year to year. They've been hard to come by this year, but I had a chance to catch them calling in this video:

At about 8 seconds, and again at 18 - the rising zeeeeee! is coming from a flock of siskins up in the trees.

It was always a joy to head out with Pete, and he had a few nuggets of wisdom he'd share now and then:

"People ask me, Pete, how do you find all of those birds? And I'd tell 'em… I go out... and look. for. them." Simple wisdom that I can put to use as I'm out looking for 425 things. If I'm sitting around inside, there's really not much to be seen (I mean. . . except for those moths).

"Funny thing about birds - they can fly." This was usually in reference to some isolated bird sighting - a bird that Pete missed, or a bird he found and nobody else had a chance to see. I like it as a reminder to enjoy the birds as they come. It's not a bad reminder to enjoy the people in your current orbit. Pete is a fine example of someone who was here, and then was not. Whether it's family or friends, it's good to remember how awesome it is that your paths have crossed - every time that they do.

"Never show up without flowers." - totally unrelated, but not a bad thought. And that one encapsulates what a classy man he was.

He's missed, but every time I hear siskins, I think of him and smile.

Do you have a connection like that. . . ?

3/7-10 Worm Moon

Signs of Spring

The week has really been full of signs of spring - even to someone who has been tied down with writing, it's impossible to miss them during the brief trips out into the sunlight:

1. The first yellowjacket of spring. Interestingly, this is two genuses worth of insects. How many live around here? Not sure, but this site seems to be telling me that the most likely suspect is Vespidae Pennsylvanica. Stinging insects had always been something that put me into fight or flight, until I finally got bitten by one of these a few years back. It hurt. Not much. Since then, I have been trying to get to know the pollinators around here. We fear what we don't understand, right?

2. First worm. Fittingly, with the worm moon, I saw a robin pulling a worm up out of the ground. Not sure what kind of annelid it was, but the ground is warm enough for them to be moving around just fine.

3. Pacific chorus frog (or Pacific tree frog). They're singing! Nothing says spring like the sound of these guys filling the night.

The other two animals of note in the last week: Common Raccoon, and . . . a fish. I was at the mouth of the Cedar River and a fish - easily over a foot long - jumped up out of the water. Twice. And I realized that I have not a clue what the list of possibilities even is at this time of year.

So fish and worms will be my homework until next time!

3/5 A Rude Awakening

I did my daily peek at the front porch light on the way out the door, and saw a moth tangled up in a web. I blew some air past it and got no response. A sad way to get a moth, but it was pretty well intact, so I went inside, got a utensil and a plate to scoop it down and brought it inside.

As I was getting ready to draw it. . . the moth, which had previously allowed itself to be nudged around and moved, suddenly started twitching, flicking its wings, and then walking! I got the little thing back outside, undrawn, but apparently woken up from some kind of hibernation.

An interesting round of searches

I tried "do moths hibernate in winter", and came across "Winter Moth". The pictures looked a lot like the moth I had just set free. Yay!

I read up on Ortheroptera Brumata, a.k.a. Winter Moth, and found out it was an invasive pest in the Pacific Northwest. Boo!

(image from bugguide.net - Molly Jacobson)

And then I continued on with the search, trying to figure out what family this moth was in, and learned that Ortheroptera Bruceata, Bruce Spanworm Moth looks very similar. Hm.

(image from TheDistractedNaturalist)

Compare both to the picture I shot of (undoubtedly) the same moth a few nights ago: 

Ortheroptera sp?

So I don't know exactly what to think, but I was happy to get the moth down to two species!  These two are similar not only in appearance but in habits. They are active in winter months, and have females that are flightless. They are in the family Geometridae, which oddly enough is not on the Pacific Northwest Moth site. The name of the family comes from the larvae - inchworms!

(Istocphoto - Eric Shaw)

So that was the excitement for the morning, and I will be able to count it as "a thing" for now. Other moths, as long as I know they're not one of those two species, can count on their own. Maybe I'll be able to find one of these moths again and identify it, but we'll see.

Close to 100 things so far!