More mushrooms. And a couple of lichens.

There was a delay with the photos I promised the other day, but they're finally here and usable.

First, the mushrooms. These are still from our stay near Chase 3 years ago. Again, this is dry country, hot in the summer, very cold in the winter. Scrub conifers, mixed forest, open grassland. We were there, off and on, from July through September.

A little red mushroom, quite shiny. There were yellow ones like this, and a few purple ones, too, looking like prune plums fallen off a tree.

And a nice little earth tongue. Also in cream.

And lichen: this one looks like wolf lichen, Letharia vulpina to me. This was used and traded by the native peoples as a dye for baskets and other items. Lichens of North America says,

"This lichen is sufficiently poisonous that the Achomawi in Northern California used it to make poison arrowheads, but the Okanagan-Colville (note: that's just south of Chase, where we were.) made a weak tea of it to treat internal problems,..."

It would make a good dye, for sure. A lime-yellow, sulphur-yellow; too strong a colour to look natural; more like a dollar store plastic toy colour.

A large leaf lichen. On conifers, live or dead.

Besides these, we saw a variety of leaf and crustal lichens, ragbag lichen, and plenty of fishnet lichens. We watched a large ground-dwelling leaf lichen, probably a Peltigera, developing along the trail over the summer, as we came and went. It grew in a spiral pattern, getting to about 10 inches across before the first frost.

Next: the Easter bunny, in the wild.