Thursday.
But it's already Friday night.
This is yesterday's report card with the unseen bonus pictures from Wednesday's report. That's overstepping my self-imposed same-day-photography posting rules by a lot, but it also comes with an added bonus of being able to tag this as my contribution to #FungiFriday by 
I finally found my first fly agarics of this year during my afternoon walk on Wednesday, they didn't make it into that day's report but it would be a shame to not give them any spotlight at all.
The one pictured above is basically the picture-book example of an amanita muscaria. Plenty thick white freckles on a perfectly red cap with a well pronounced scarf around its neck.
Apart from that, this is Thursday's report and it has a shamefully low score of less than 6k steps. It rained a lot that day and I've had some rough days and nights lately so I switched my afternoon walk for some healthy nap-time and failed to take any pictures all day.
Which brings us back to the amanita muscaria from Wednesday:
They rarely grow alone, and so I found plenty of them. Small ones and big ones, with lots of freckles, tinted yellow or perfectly white. Randomly placed or evenly spaced.
And some have barely any freckles at all.
These freckles by the way, they are called "volval patches". They don't grown on the cap, they are actually the remnants of a protective skin, called the "velum", that covers the mushroom when it's still undeveloped, like a little egg in the ground.
That egg is referred to as a "button" and it's often still recognizable at the very base of the stalk where the remaining protective velum forms a cup which is called the "volva", like the patches on top. Mycology has a whole lingo to it.
While the fly agaric is often stereotyped as the most poisonous mushroom, it really isn't. It has been used in shamanic rituals for ages and it's probably not a coincidence that it works as a power-up for our favourite Italian plumber, Mario.
Or think of Alice, how it helped her shrink and grow.
I don't have any experience with it myself and I seriously do not recommend just going out and eating them, but I am still kind of curious, though, to be honest. Unfortunately my 24/7 responsibility with grandma's wellbeing doesn't allow for such experiments anyway.
Thanks for your time!
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