Red raspberry slime mold, 'Tubifera ferruginosa."
Slimes are really a fascinating puzzle to me. This one felt surprisingly firm and rubbery.
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Neat. I’ve never seen that one before. I don’t know slime molds very well. But you seem to have really been learning your fungi lately. Good at Idyinf them.
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Thanks. I have to admit, I’ve been using the “Seek” app! But I do enjoy them a lot. Wish I had a quarter of your knowledge!
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I see. I am getting more and more tempted to use apps. Occasionally I use Facebook groups. But I’m also trying to learn how to key out features. Mushroom anatomy and key features mostly, are still something I struggle with. I kind of suffer from mushroom blindness. They all kind of look alike except for gills and pores and colors. But I will eventually get them down assuming I don’t die or go blind or something. I need to learn the jargon. But I think I’ll just dedicate a day a month to mushrooms for now and focus again on plants deeper. Especially trees and shrubs. Been looking at some books on buds. The next group I really want to focus on are the families of the Beech, Magnoliaceae and Ericaceae.
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I do have the Audubon series of fungi, birds, mammals and flowering plants, and I’ve used them when Seek doesn’t work right. It has some difficulty with fungi, too. I have a lot to learn.
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A bog, a birch tree with multiple roots almost like a mangrove in a swamp, some sort of Northern Oak, and according to that seek app, likely a brittlegill mushroom
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Mossy Maze Polypore (Cerrena unicolor), Indian Cucumber Root (Medeola Virginians), and Eastern North American destroying angel (Amanita bisporigera), according to Wikipedia, the Indian cucumber root is edible and the Indians used it for anti-seizure medicine and for children medicine. However, as you can guess, the destroying Angel is very toxic
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A few recent bird pictures of mine:
Golden-winged, possible Kirtland’s, and female Black-throated Green Warblers.
I could add a few thousand more, but that would take a while.
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The Dusky Pygmy Rattlesnake. Admittedly I thought it was a baby cottonmouth at first but something kept saying many a dusky Pygmy and so I posted it to a group and turns out it was a rattlesnake.
It was so tiny , as you can tell by my hand, that I would have missed it if not for the fact I was following deer tracks in the sand and a footprint was close by. While I was within striking zone , I knew I was most likely safe because it was looking in the opposite direction and very calm. Did not even rattle its tail which is what encouraged the cottonmouth false id.
I think this beautiful baby alligator was stalking me. Within about 5 stops within 100 feet over about half an hour this little thing snuck up closer and closer. At one time it came out of the water and followed me a few feet. Very pretty speckled face.
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Gorgeous! In our final year of seminary, my wife and I spent ten weeks on a work placement with a church on Oahu. Hawaii was hands down the most beautiful place I’ve ever had the fortune to lay my eyes on. I stayed with a bachelor in Waikiki (for my sins) and my wife (fiancé at the time) stayed with a family in Hawaii Kai.
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That’s awesome. I’m so happy for you and your family!
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A small Old Man of the Woods mushroom. They normally are not around this late but you still find a few scattered around. These are the mushrooms that have the consistency of steak fat and taste really good fried with liquid smoke. When you cut the cap it instantly starts to turn from white to bloody red and after several minutes it’s black. Found in no wood forests of oaks and pines.
A large , and friendly, softback turtle. We have three species and I’m not familiar with them enough to ID them. This is actually the first one I’ve seen in my life. Was not even sure what kind it was before asking for help to ID. When just the crown of its head and its nose is above water it makes it look almost like a little alligator head xd.
This is the eastern fence post lizard. It’s very fast and natural selection is making it faster because of invasive fire ant species killing lots of the slower ones and so we are seeing ones with longer legs and faster speeds. It’s back blends in very well with the grayish black of old oak bark. The real treat is their shiny blue undersides. It’s hard to get a good look at them though. In like 5 seconds they can be 10 feet away and 10 feet up a tree.
This is two different beetles of the same species. I’m not sure of their ID. One of them I noticed had what seemed to be some kind of eggs on it but I’m not sure. I’ll have to post it and see what others say in a beetle group. It was trapped in a spiders web with no spider around but there was spider egg sacs. I freed it and that’s when I noticed the potential eggs all around its “throat” area.
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The turtle appears to be Gulf Coast Smooth Softshell.
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I was thinking it was based off of what I was reading concerning the nostrils of “Apalone mutica” but was not 100% certain what the other c shaped nostrils would look like because of ridges.
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Part of my lunch today was these fruits. The grapes are the “cotton candy carnival “ variations that has been going around in the last few years on and off. Probably my favorite variety. Some sweet peppers, some kind of plumb thing, a cutie style orange, and blueberries. Ice cold and really juicy. Helps to counter the direct sunlight and 96°f temp I’m in all day working. I often wonder how many heirlooms have we lost in the last few hundred years. What was the most popular fruits for early mankind and what will happen as climate control hits. As less land is farmable, and the shelf life becomes more important, I wonder what cultivars will rise up that potentially pales to what we have now.
Makes me think of how ancient Mesopotamians over a thousand years practice bad irrigation resulted in ofer salted land as water evaporated leaving before the salts.
https://laulima.hawaii.edu/access/content/user/millerg/ANTH_151/Anth151Unit3/EndofMeso.html
It will be harder and harder to farm in the future despite us having more and more people needing to be fed.
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An assortment of things from a hike yesterday. Though the eastern six lined runner lizard is from a few days before that. The trees are sweetgum, hickory , live oak and maybe a pine. I don’t remember which ones loaded up or in what order.
I also just happen to end up having another kitten. It’s roughly 8 days old. It’s mother was killed and both of its eyes were infected and swollen. But got it to the vet, it’s eyes are cleared up a lot and they can open them now. Got him on formula which is tough. Takes about 15-20 minutes per feeding and wiping to stimulate him into using the bathroom. But the rough part is waking up twice at night to do it and then get back to sleep. But he’s doing a lot better. I use to have three cats instead of two and so it will not be a issue. Hopefully by the end of this week or early next week though he will be able to drink from a saucer so I don’t have to keep bottle feeding him. He’s actually the three years younger brother of my other Russian blue cat. But I have fun after work using my hand as a monster he plays fight with lol.
Pretty mad. This is edited in after the fact and sad news thst the kitten, Baby Blue, passed away. Unfortunately it’s not from some kind of natural cause but the fact that crawled on top of his little cat home, the ones made off cotton and semi firm and fell down the back side face first and was not able to get out and seems to have suffocated. I set up the work teams so that I could take the next few days off to help take care of him during this stage until he could drink from a saucer and now I wish I would have started that today and have prevented this from happening.
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I’m so sorry about your kitten @SkovandOfMitaze 
The lizard looks like the skinks that were around in Delaware, the kind with the blue tails. Are they related? I thought of them like another step to being ok with snakes, since their long bodies and stripes always caught me off guard at first. Those skinks are kind of cool 
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Skinks and runners are not that closely related but they do often oook similar.
Thanks.
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Various asters.
Nice pine savanna. It’s one of my favorite grasslands.
Ant that succumbed to the “zombie virus”. Almost missed it. Chance encounter. I was internally debating on stealing a bid and twig tip from a big leaf magnolia when I noticed it. You can see it’s final death bite as it prepared to die.
A decent sized lion’s mane mushroom. Ate half of it yesterday for dinner. Found about a dozen more that was strawberry sized and in spot squirrels won’t get to it most likely and it was a few miles out in the woods and so another person is also very unlikely to come across it. But nothing is guaranteed. As mentioned before it’s always a battle between picking mushrooms at a smaller size or risk them being taken and waiting for them to get bigger. They often triple in size in a week.
Probably the remains of a grasshopper corpse that died as parasitic wasp larva bursted out of its back.
When resting while hiking in often reading through my book of some of the local trees to help me spot them quicker. Plus it’s relaxing to be miles away from civilization in a good spot under a tree and just read.
Sp
Spotted orb weaver.
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