Today I left my car in the yard and walked to the peninsula near the port of my hometown, a lovely archeological park covered with pines, meadows, rich layers of history, and even some fungi in this part of the year.
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This relatively big mushroom is the Volvopluteus gloiocephalus.
It's edible but pretty hard to distinguish from the lethal Deathcaps, especially when young. Furthermore, it's considered watery and poor in quality, so I never tried it.
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Usually, I find plenty of these mushrooms on the grassy terrain around the remains of the Roman villa from the 2nd century. Here you can take a wider look at that place and scenery.
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As mentioned before, usually I find groups of Volvopluteus gloiocephalus mushrooms, scattered across the field in between pine groves and the sea. But not this time. Today I found only one umbrella spread above the juicy green grass.
Although the vegetation along the bay is prevalently evergreen, some shrubs do lose their leaves in autumn ...
... and one of those colorful leaves landed on the grass not far from the aforementioned mushroom.
I took these photographs in the evening ...
... as the sun was disappearing behind the lands across the bay. Soon I left the park and walked home,so this post ends here - THE END. He, he, he, he - just kidding!
I mean, it's true that I walked back home after this encounter with a Volvopluteus gloiocephalus mushroom, but this post is relatively far from being over.
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It continues with my first finding of the day ...
... a small group of some currently unidentified mushrooms that grew under an old pine tree.
They looked a bit like Agrocybe pediades. A bit like Marasmius oreades. But not exactly like them. Most of all, they looked like some generic-looking, pretty confusing small mushrooms that can provoke a slight, but annoying headache if you try to define them as a named species.
They also looked pretty good, actually. Especially when photographed in natural light.
About fifty meters from there, under another pine ...
... I found another small mushroom that I wasn't able to identify.
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After an hour of aimless rambling, I came across a rotting stump of some deciduous tree ...
... and there I found an abundant growth of these interesting fungi.
Judging by this photograph that shows only one side of the fruiting body, they look like some Turkey tail polypore.
Here you can see the other side of the same fruiting body. It resembles some jelly fungus. It's semi-translucent and it looks great in natural light. The light in the shade of the trees was pretty subdued, so it took a lot of patience and relatively long exposure to get this shot from an uncomfortable position close to the ground. Although things in natural light looked esthetically more pleasing ...
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... I took a couple of shots with the flash on, as well. It was easily done and it provided a better insight into all details of the surface.
I'm pretty sure that this is some fungus from the Stereaceae family, probably the genus Stereum of that family. It could be the Stereum hirsutum, commonly known as the Hairy curtain crust or False turkey tail, but when it comes to the exact species - I'm not so sure.
The most interesting aspect of this find was that the fruiting bodies scattered along the piece of rotting wood were in different stages of development.
Here you can see a very young, minuscule one. The shape is also very simple.
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This one is slightly bigger. The shape is more complex with multiple folds.
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The lateral view reveals a bit of the upper, hairy surface. If you enlarge this picture and take a good look at the white, upper surface of the fungus, you may notice a minuscule red creature on it.
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This is the Brachystomella parvula springtail.
Here you can see another fruiting body, and again, this one is slightly bigger than the previous two. In the following picture ...
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... the fungi are much larger ...
... and the upper side is darker ...
... at this stage. The developed fruiting bodies in the last three pictures are firm but still juicy. With the time ...
... they will slowly desiccate and reassemble the bark of the wood. The fungus in this shot is considerably drier ...
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... and that becomes even more evident if you take a look from the other side.
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When they dry out completely, the fruiting bodies are hard and dark, resembling chunks of the bark. In this picture made of four shots, you can see those dark, desiccated surfaces that I saw many times before, but you can also see some amazing stuff, completely new to me. This was my first encounter with the minuscule white things that grew on the Stereum fruiting bodies. From a distance, they looked like a multitude of very small mushrooms ...
... but when I took a better look through the macro lens ...
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... it looked more like this stuff was produced by the Stereum fungus itself. So what is this exactly?
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Well, I don't know - but it looks cool. Maybe it has something to do with the spore propagation. I have no answers, only maybes.
These are definitively minuscule mushrooms. The Mycena corticola mushrooms.
Here you can see them in natural light.
Some of them grew very close to the Stereum fungi. If you enlarge the following photograph ...
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... you can take a good look at both species, and compare them.
These minuscule Mycena were sparsely scattered across the whole piece of rotting wood.
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They looked pretty cute and photogenic ...
... especially when surrounded by moss ...
... so I took quite a few Mycena corticola portraits today.
This group of mushrooms was found on the ground, very near to the rotting stump.
I don't know the name of the species ...
... or anything else about these small mushrooms.
I used the macro lens to get a couple of portraits, after which I continued my rambling around the small peninsula in the bay of Medulin, my hometown.
Half an hour later I reached the area where I photographed the Volvopluteus gloiocephalus mushroom from the opening pictures of this post.
I was surrounded by flowers there. Here you can see the Silene vulgaris flower.
While photographing the lovely flowers of the Stachys recta plant ...
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... I noticed a few ants crawling up and down the stem.
When I mounted the macro lens to take a better look ...
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... I saw some of those ants working around a herd of aphids.
At this point, the day was rapidly coming to its end.
I photographed these beautiful Linaria vulgaris flowers in the evening light, and then walked back home ... sow now, here ... the post really has to end.
As always here on HIVE, the photographs are my work - THE END.