Shaggy Mane Mushroom, Clearing Deadfall, plus Pippi

Lance coaxed me out again to see a pretty mushroom he found growing near our driveway.

This is a shaggy mane (Coprinus comatus), or shaggy ink cap mushroom. Shaggy manes are interesting because they deliquesce into black, spore-rich goo, or “ink”, as they come to the end of their life cycle, or within 12 hours of being picked or broken off. It’s the mushroom’s way of providing food for their spores.

You can see this one is already beginning to melt; that black ring around the bottom of the cap is the ink.

I’ve heard that the black melty stuff has actually been used for ink; sometimes people add tea tree oil to help deal with the decayed mushroom smell. Phew.

Shaggy manes are edible, particularly when picked and eaten young—before the ink stage. You just want to be sure to get shaggy mane ink caps (Coprinus comatus), and not common ink caps (Coprinopsis atramentaria), which are not edible.

The two are pretty easy to tell apart, though. The common ink caps are smooth, rather than shaggy.

I wasn’t interested in picking or eating this one, but Lance was right; I really did enjoy seeing it, and was glad I’d gone down there.

We also went out on our slough trail. Lance has been working to clear the trees in the slough that fell during or after the hurricane; they’ve blocked the path in several places. We only had one major remaining deadfall to climb over, and I expect Lance and his new (larger) chainsaw may get that one cut through eventually.

Pippi was delighted to be out on a walk with us, and she scampered ahead, climbing easily over downed trees and probably wondering why in the world we were slow-poking so far behind. For her, all the new deadfall makes for entertaining new playgrounds.

Below you can see of one of the spots on the slough trail that Lance has recently cleared. Bonus points if you can see Pippi rolling in the leaves as she waits for us to come on already.

Finally, I collected a few empty seed heads from a downed tulip poplar tree. They start out looking like skinny pine cones, but after expanding and letting go of all their seeds, they look like little wooden flowers. I have always enjoyed them.