Ah the Fecundity! A Fungus Walk through Castellow Hammock
This post has been long in the making. Not the text, which isn’t very involved, but the photos. Saturday, October 15, 2011 was an overcast day after many days of heavy rain in South Florida. After heavy rain, I always am hopeful for mushrooms to photograph and wonder at, so I drove south to Homestead and Castellow Hammock park. Castellow is a hardwood hammock with a looping trail. It’s almost always dark inside the hammock, very jungly, moist, and fertile.
Castellow attracts all sorts of birds, arthropods (excelling in butterflies & moths, aka lepidoptera), and beautiful liguus tree snails, once pushed towards extinction by greedy shell collectors.
But I went hoping not for animals, not for plants, but for fungi! And I was not disappointed. I’ve never come across so many types of fungi in such a small area! It’s taken me the past week to develop the digital files, which I may need to present in two posts. If anyone has input to identifying these fungi, feel free to contact me. I won’t even attempt it. Here they are in order of “discovery:”
Fungi consumed by fungi?
Tiny umbrellas — These looked almost ceramic
Purplish-brown decurrent gills on this cuplike fungus
Purple mushroom — same species as previous image?
Chinese hat-like mushroom growing on a tree root
- Earth Star mushrooms
Looks like sliced ham
Tiny orange cup fungus
Dead Man's Fingers fungus
These are over half of what I found that day. More to come in a second post.
Kenneth Setzer 