A Tropical Rain Forest?

Posted on July 10, 2013 by wahkeenanaturepreserveblog

Sure has felt that way hasn’t it? Warm, humid, and rain showers everyday! This weather pattern certainly has made things lush! It seems as though today will bring an end to this tropical phase. So, let’s set some good memories down! There have been some neat photo opportunities with all this water, and also a few surprises. One of them happens to be all the really cool fungus that has popped up due to the – let’s say moist – conditions. 🙂 Although I have begun reading up on fungi and their “mysterious” ways I’m definitely not to the ID stage yet, so we’ll just look at the pretty pictures, and if any of you would like to chime in with additional info, please do! Hold on to your hats, there are a lot of them!

I ended up finding a pretty wide array of colors, including this soft orange.

Many of the ‘shrooms had been munched on like this red one.

I believe I’ve posted this fungus before. it’s been growing on the downed spruce trees for a while now. It’s very soft and jelly-like.

This one seemed to have another kind of fungus growing on top.

These guys were growing in a wide patch. It was quite the forest of mushrooms!

They looked like a crowd of brown colored umbrellas opened against the rain.

This one also had many brethren. I wondered if the mushroom in the first photo could be the same kind as these, just younger.

This orange color seemed to glow against the forest floor.

I was so happy to see that my camera picked up this guy’s color so accurately.

It also had a velvety looking texture.

This lovely mushroom had color’s that were difficult to capture with the camera. It looks quite green in the above photo.

Here in the close-up, the truer yellow colors came through.

Although I have bowed out of identifying these things, I will make a comment about the one pictured above and a very similar one pictured below. I don’t think these are coral fungi. I think they belong in the jelly fungus group, but I’m not sure. One of the mushroom books we have mentions texture as a way of telling them from coral fungi, but i failed to touch them.

One thing I did notice though, is that the tips are kind of clubbed. The picture of the true coral fungus in the books show almost fringe-y looking tips. Anyway, it’s a bit of a gut thing, but it’s still good to know that there are coral fungus look-a-likes out there.