Thursday, January 14, 2016

Fungi Fun

I took the kids on a six and a half mile hike today. At least that's what my Fitbit tells me. The expected newts were not out on the trails. Maybe it was too cold for them. Toward the middle of the hike, the temperature seemed to drop (maybe because we'd stopped hiking uphill for awhile), and toward the end, it started raining. By the time I left work, it was pelting the ground pretty hard.

There is a lot of Witch's Butter out at the moment. It's edible, but everybody I know who has tried it says it's completely tasteless. It's quite pretty though. Poking around on Wikipedia, I notice that Witch's Butter is sometimes confused with a fungus called Golden Ear. That's the thing about fungi. There is often confusion, so picking and eating them can (and sometimes does) lead to death. I don't know if Golden Ear is edible or not. The fungi in the picture below might actually be Golden Ear. Golden Ear parasitises a pathogenic plant fungus called Stereum hirsutum. I'm not sure if the other fungus in the picture is S. hirsutum or not. More research is needed. I really don't know a whole lot about fungi.

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