Beginning of Mushrooms at Point Reyes

These photos are from about a month ago now, taken after the rains had been going on for several weeks. I was hoping things would be as far along as they were last year, but I think we were earlier this time, and the mushrooms were only beginning to show above ground.

I'm not going to try to identify these now but rather want to wait until some more serious effort has gone into the process. My personal advice on mushrooms in the wild is DON'T EVEN THINK ABOUT EATING IT! But I'm a coward that way. For me the joy of mushrooms is in the unexpected and mysterious arrival. At my work there was one I called the "butt fungus" because these almost baby human sized posteriors would literally come up over night. (That is, they were the size of baby butts, not the size of babies themselves....)

So for now, enjoy. This is my record of what was seen. I hope to end up with a collection of mushroom posts, I'm pretty sure I have my photos from last year somewhere. Meanwhile, these are the mushrooms that I found growing along the Bear Valley Trail in December, 2019.

There is a place along the trail where completely moss covered tree branches lean across it from both sides. I feel like we are entering into a magical forest and the branches could close and make the trail invisible if we don't say the right incantation.

This was a fantastic day, cloudy but not too cold, the first non-rainy day in a while. Everyone we met on the trail, which included large groups of people who sounded like international tourists, had a look of wonderment on their faces. We all greeted each other like fellow travelers in Wonderland, a place we had all been given special permission to visit on that particular day.

Black "goop". In some areas it looks like semi-translucent dark green-brown bubbles, other places just shrunken, gloomy and so black that it reflects light and obscures its shape when I try to take photos.

There were several banana slugs cruising about on an old log. I've learned that they sleep in fissures and cracks in the trunks of trees, because I see them emerging when I go for my walks.

My favorites are the mushrooms that come out of tree trunks:

We have figured out that this has nothing to do with mushrooms, but rather is sticky tree sap emerging from certain trees. In fact, it seems rather mushroom-repellant.

Turkey Tails?

This was a strange, deteriorating thing on the bottom of a fallen tree trunk that runs over the path. I've fiddled with it digitally to make it more abstract, since it was a lousy quality photo otherwise, but it was pretty abstract to begin with.

Honey-like globs that showed up on a particular group of shelf fungi

Digitized shredded log. I'm always drawn to this particular one because of the contrast in textures and colors.

That's it for this hike. I have a second set of photos from a couple of weeks later, but there are very few new kinds of mushrooms showing up. We will walk again some time this week, so we shall see....