Fungi, Beavers Bend 052415

Cloudy and wet, 75°F. 

I’m so behind in blogging since spring came! I’ll have to go back to my road trip home from Santa Fe some rainy day.

I recently took a trip down to Beavers Bend State Park for the first time. It is so unlike being in Oklahoma! Lots of water and trees and all sorts of great stuff. Oklahoma had record rainfalls in May 2015 and the weekend I was in Beavers Bend was cloudy and dark with periods of heavy rainfall. Lucky me! the mushrooms and wildflowers were loving all the moisture. I’m going to break this trip up into a few manageable categories, the first being fungi!

The first and most amazing fungus I found was a Black Trumpet! Right outside the cabin! I couldn’t believe it when I saw it, I was so excited.

Love the baby tree too.

So pretty! These mushrooms are closely related to  the edible chanterelle family and are considered delicacies. They were delicious! They had a wonderful odor and a smoky mushroom taste. I will be looking for these next season!

Another interesting mushroom I notice outside the cabin was this beautiful little guy. I’m guessing it’s in the Amanita family. I love the streaks of color on it.

I went for a short hike up by the Broken Bow dam. There I saw my first Hairy Rubber Cup, and it was everywhere!

These cups are unlike the ones I usually see that are uniformly thin and rubbery, these bad boys were thick and firm and when cut open are filled with a gel. I love their textures!

This side view shows just how thick and deep the cup is.

This is an older one that shows the texture of the inside of the cup. Looks like some little cup buds over to the right.

This tiny scarlet cup was nearby for comparison. It’s not even a fourth the size of the rubber cups, you might be able to tell scale by the leaves.

This isn’t a cup fungus, but a jelly fungus commonly called Wood Ear. Because it looks like an ear sometimes. It is edible and is popular in asian cuisine. I have not tried it myself.

Here’s another one, notice the velvety texture. They are very common.

Here are some white ones. I’ve never seen them white before. I’m sure this is different than the jelly ear, but it is similar in a lot of ways. There is a brown jelly ear right below it for comparison.

I don’t know what this cinnamon colored mushroom is, but I liked the frilly edges and the thick widely spaced gills. It was small, maybe a couple inches wide at the cap.

Here are those gills!

Brilliantly colored type of edible chanterelle. If you look at the “gills”, they are not really gills. They are folds that run down the stem and are connected to it.

Some adorable little mushrooms inside a hollowed out log – along with a nut shell.

A big ole coral mushroom (big for a coral mushroom). I love how they look like they came straight out of the sea. Beautiful structures.

This one is much smaller and is a different fungus. Still super adorable! See how small? compare it to the leaf stem.

A perfect little bolete. I didn’t want to disturb it to get a shot of its underside, which has tubes instead of gills.

Ok, this thing was beautiful! soft and velvety, just a nice color too. I thought it was a bolete right off, but I hadn’t seen one like it before. I had to disturb this one to see the underside.

and what?? It didn’t even have a proper cap that is separate from the stem. The underside  was smooth. I touched it to see the texture and you can see where my finger was – it shows the pores, which appear to be somewhat covered. It was very firm, the whole thing was solid and firm.

This photo shows the cap and stem are NOT separate, making it not a bolete, or mushroom, but a polypore! Polyporus radicatus. So cool. If you look at the base of the polypore you can see a dark “root”. That is the way this baby grows from dead wood underground. I love this polypore disguised as a mushroom!

This is another type of polypore just getting started growing.

This is the monster toothed polypore! it was huge (for what it was). I kept looking at it thinking, why are the teeth on top? I don’t know, but they seem to grow in many different ways. I believe this is a standard violet toothed polypore, but it is a good one. You can see all the shelf layers it has grown. The fuzzy white with purple edges is the top of the polypore.

A little closer look and you can see it is a standard toothed polypore in most areas, then some seem to have curled up, or are just starting to grow – who knows. All I know is it has some beautiful color and texture.

I think that’s all the fungus from Beavers Bend! next are the wildflowers. Soon! I promise.