Mushrooming

When you go out and look for birds it's called "birding", so if you go out to look for mushrooms it's called "mushrooming". Right?

Whatever it's called, it's an activity I look forward to. I have noticed that Fall seems to be the time of year with the highest diversity of mushrooms, at least that's the case here in the northern Rockies. One year we visited Glacier National Park in late September and were amazed at the variety of fungi we found in the cedar forests there, including a magnificent purple mushroom! Unfortunately the forest was so dense that I couldn't get a good well-lit photograph of it.

Most of these photos I took a few years ago in the Clearwater National Forest in Idaho. The trail leads to a very popular hot springs, but I was there to enjoy the fungi.

I find mushrooms fascinating, but I'm no expert at identification. The process of identifying a mushroom is much more complex than birding. It's not enough to simply look at a mushroom and figure out what kind it is from the guide book (plus they don't have calls or chip notes).

Creating spore prints is a common form of identification. Some types of mushroom have a certain odor that can aid in identification. But in some cases, the only way to know if a mushroom is of a certain species is to cut it open and check for coloring in the stem!

 

If you'd like to know more about the complexities of mushroom identification, I recommend mushroomexpert.com 

And if you can identify any of these mushrooms, let me know!

Illustration Friday - Intricate

I heard my first American robins of the season chirping on Thursday (just before a snowstorm blew into the valley, of course) so I've had the species on my mind. I wish I could say that I saw this nesting robin this weekend, but no such luck. This is from a trip to an Audubon site in Coeur D'Alene, Idaho two springs ago. The robin had built such an intricate nest of twigs, grasses and mud, all interwoven around some branches of a hawthorne sapling. I have no idea if it thought the thorns might give it some protection or not, but it seemed like a good set up.

I did this quick pencil and watercolor sketch from a photograph I took that day. Madeleine helped with the sketch immensely; inspecting the watercolor water, checking out the eraser, walking over the sketch to make sure the watercolor paint was dry (luckily it was). What would I do without her?













I've been feeling a little over-extended and run down lately, so I wasn't sure I was even going to get an Illustration Friday entry up this week. My better half was at a conference this weekend, so I planned a much needed personal retreat for myself. Except for running a few necessary errands on Saturday morning, I devoted my time to only doing what I felt like doing. I indulged in a massage, cooked myself a very healthy and delicious dinner - balancing that out by baking a chocolate torte as well - did some yoga, sketched, curled up with a cup of almond tea and finally watched "The Science of Sleep" (a quirky, romantic French film that totally spoke to my inner child) and just generally recharged my batteries. Not only did it inspire me to go ahead and tackle IF, but I feel like I can face another week now too!