Spring birds

I haven’t had any time in the last six months to photograph the things I love…work and life have been overwhelming…but I finally took the time to shoot some of my favorite spring birds.

The rose-breasted grosbeak always brings me joy, even the female that was sporting a mohawk in all of her brown glory 🤎 There were three different males this year ❤️🤍🖤

I always love it when the pileated pair come to the feeder. The male seems to love posing 🖤🤍❤️

And I’m pretty sure this is at least the second year I’ve seen this particular male American goldfinch. I recognize the toupee, which is especially stylish this year 💛🖤🐤😆

Coming up for air...

It’s been a while since I’ve posted and I am trying to get better about that if for no other reason than to memorialize things for myself. Life gets in the way, though. A lot.

I took this picture of mycena haematopus - commonly known as bleeding fairy helmet - in the fall and continue to be amazed at the different forms I find of this. To the point that I am not really sure if it’s the same mushroom with lots of variations or a different type altogether. I need to get into the practice of making spore prints to help with identification but I really don’t like to pick or cut anything. My purpose is to document and preserve, but in order to do that, I may need to start spore printing.

This picture has become the cover of the little book I made, mostly for my neighbors, as a thank-you for everyone’s hard work to save our little patch of woods. We were successful in that the developer withdrew their plans to destroy our woods for a three-story town home project. While we are thrilled, we know the fight will never be over even though the last thing we need is more housing in an already overdeveloped area.

To that end, I am going to send a copy of my book to the land owner who gave me permission years ago to photograph in the woods but has no idea of what I’ve documented over the years. Maybe I can convince him to take it off the market. I will also send a copy to the Plan Commission whose members, gratefully, are very much about green space conservation and put the developer’s feet to the fire to be forthcoming about what the real plans were, which were not what they submitted, and to be prepared to save more trees than they said they would “if possible.” It was vague language and the Plan Commissioners picked up on it. So I want to show them, too, what they saved and, hopefully, will continue to work to preserve.

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Mycena Haematopus - Bleeding Fairy Helmet

Call to action...

I’m looking at the very real possibility of losing my woods to a large, three-story townhome project. If it’s cleared through the Plan Commission, I will be staring at the front facade of many buildings instead of woods when I look out my windows. I will also lose the place I have been walking and photographing almost daily for more years than I can count. They want to cram nine multi-unit buildings and parking lots on less than three acres and have already had drilling equipment in the woods to assess where to bring in water even though the project has not yet been approved. In that process, their tank-like piece of equipment ran over, and completely smashed into the ground, one of the hot-spot logs that has produced numerous slime molds and mushrooms that I have photographed. At the time, it was growing a clump of tubifera ferruginosa that I have not seen in the woods for several years. There is also a large northern hackberry tree that rivals the state champion in size. Until I mentioned it at one of the neighborhood meetings, no one knew it existed. Whether or not we can get it declared a historical or legacy tree remains to be seen but the fight is on for our neighborhood plot of greenspace. Hopefully this summer will not be the last pictures from my walks in the woods.

The tubifera below survived the tank and I always love finding the tiny sea creature forms of it. It’s about the size of a pencil eraser. I am not completely sure it is tubifera ferruginosa but it appears to be at least a form of it.

My bucket list

I have a lot of things on my bucket list and most of them involve finding and photographing certain mushrooms and slime molds. But there are a few birds that live on that list and the Snowy Owl is one of them. There are currently at least two in my area and I’ve heard there are others. It is not typical to see them this far south in Indiana so I was overjoyed at getting the opportunity to photograph this young female. Somehow I feel that her landing on the speed limit sign was directed at me 😂

A couple of fall finds...

It’s been so long since I’ve been able to get out and walk the woods, plus it’s been so dry until the last couple of weeks that when I did get out, I wasn’t finding anything. Yesterday’s walk yielded the beginning of a tiny mushroom that I’ve never seen before and a log full of one of my favorite tiny cup fungi - bisporella citrina - better known as yellow fairy cups. It’s been a couple of years since I last saw it so I spent as much time in the waning evening light photographing it as much as I could. Hopefully it will still be viable to photograph again today when I get home from work, but my experience with the mycetes family is that it can be there one day and gone the next. I will also try to keep an eye on the tiny (.5 cm) mushroom to see if it becomes something I recognize.

A tiny surprise

I follow quite a few fungi and slime mold photographers on IG and am always fascinated by, and a little bit jealous of, the slime molds they find in their countries or in the more temperate parts of the US that are not the Midwest, where I live. We seem to have fairly run of the mill stuff and I keep thinking some day I will travel to New Zealand and Australia and Thailand and Malaysia on a fungi/slime mold hunting expedition to photograph the more exotic species that don’t grow in my area.

However, in the last couple of months I have found two things that have been surprising finds even to those that are far, far more skilled and knowledgeable than I am. I have sent the first picture of a tiny fungi to everyone I can think of and, to date, no one has been able to identify it. I am endlessly fascinated by the intricate design. I thought it was a tiny mycena mushroom but there was no stem or stalk and the Indiana mushroom expert does not believe it to be one. When I checked it the following day there had been no change in its form and the day after that there was no sign it had ever existed. Most often there will be a withered form or some sign of existence so maybe it was completely eaten by a slug. In any case, there was nothing left to try and examine. It’s still a mystery fungi. ETA: The mystery has been solved! They are butterfly eggs, not a myxo or fungi at all.

The second one is a slime mold I’ve seen pictures of and never thought I’d find in my area - metatrichia vesparium. Not only did I find it, but the second evening that I was photographing it, I found a small cluster exhibiting an iridescence that was apparently quite unusual, so much so that a couple of the experts said they’d never seen it in iridescent form before. Perhaps it only happens for a very short period of time between the plasmodium to spore stage and I just happened to catch it at the right time; I don’t know. But it rivaled some of the slime molds that I see pictures of from the PNW and New Zealand and I did a little internal celebration dance at finding something so unusual.

Those are the moments that make even facing down an angry nest of yellow jacket wasps worth it. I can’t get enough of hunting and photographing the tiny, sometimes nearly microscopic, world of slime molds. Even though I may be in a full beekeeper suit the next time I head into the woods.

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And so it begins...

We’ve had an unusually cool and dry spring so the slime molds have not appeared as early as I would have liked, nor did I find any of the usual suspects in spring mushrooms when walking in the woods. And I could have done without the late April snowstorm that killed off the magnolia blossoms that were just beginning to open. The silver lining is that fighting off the mosquitoes in the typical heat and humidity to photograph the emerging slime molds is not something I’ve missed.

I think this one is ceratiomyxa poroides. I’ve never seen it before, although since it just looks, to the naked eye, like tiny white spheres it’s quite possible I’ve walked right by it thinking it was a stemonitis that I’ve already photographed.

Let the slime mold hunting begin!

A sure sign

Each year there is a point in late January when I leave the office to go home and realize it’s 6 PM and there is still light in the sky. It’s the moment I know I’ll mentally make it through the rest of winter because the days are tangibly getting longer.

This year, Indiana was having a reasonably mild winter but then February brought weeks of a polar vortex and with it single digit highs. Because it stayed so cold, whenever it would snow, the snow didn’t melt, which is unusual for us. Then, over the course of two days, between 10 and 12 inches of new snow fell and stuck around for over a week. It got pretty old, pretty quick.

I kept the bird feeders and heated bird bath clean and full, creating and then following the same path through the snowdrifts that were deeper than my boots were high. But my birds were happy. They fluff themselves up to hold in their body heat when it gets really cold and as the winter storm approached, there were lots of puffballs perching on the feeders and branches. I especially loved the bluebirds, who also were oblivious of the air temperature and frolicked in the birdbath like it was 80 degrees.

The polar vortex finally left and we were gifted with a few 60 degree days and I’ve been wearing sandals to work ever since, willing the warm weather to stay. I also took the opportunity to reposition and fortify the bases of the feeder poles, power wash everything, and put it all back together. As I was working, out of the corner of my eye I glimpsed something purple and looked over to see the crocus in bloom all over the front yard. They are the light at the end of the long winter tunnel.

Soon it will be warm and humid, and I will be back to hunting slime molds and fungi, wishing for cooler weather to kill off the mosquitoes. But for now, I will take all the signs of spring I can get, including losing an hour of sleep when the clocks “spring forward” in a week and a half.