The Watershed recycles

In a healthy forest, nothing stays the same; everything is in a state of flux. Sure, a tree may live for 60, 100, 500, even 1000 years, but it is never static. A tree is a community; a forest is a complete world of sprouting, hatching, growing, dying, and birthing living creatures. Everything is reused, reshaped, repurposed.

Take the Watershed Park:

Cedar grove, surrounded by fast-growing red alder, paper birch, and salmonberries.

These are third- and fourth-growth trees, youngsters, as trees go. Their ancestors are now the rotting remains of enormous stumps. And they are already self-selecting, the stronger, taller trees hogging the sunlight, crowding out the smaller ones. In this photo, there are skinny logs on the ground; birches and alders mainly. One dead tree still stands, leafless; three or four more are in the process of falling, tipped over but still alive.

Even the dead trees are alive.

Herb Robert sprouting in a compost of dead leaves and twigs, on a Big-leaf maple.

Canker or rot on an old birch, on its way down.

Split and hollowed maple, growing moss.

Heart rot, caused by various fungi, weakens the tree without necessarily killing it. Insects move in, looking for shelter or food; woodpeckers bore holes to feed on the bugs. Sometimes the tree splits, but sometimes it looks solid from the outside, but is completely hollow inside. Red cedar is good at this, and many small animals nest inside, dry and hidden from predators. The list of possible residents is long: squirrels and chipmunks, chickadees, nuthaches, owls and flickers, wood ducks (near water), mice and bats - many bats - and woodrats, woodpeckers of all sorts, and on and on. Even bears; a female bear likes to den high up in a big hollow cedar.

Insects. One word to cover thousands of critters to be found in any forest. In this visit, on a dry day, most were in hiding, but the traces of beetles and wood borers were evident on every tree and log. Broken pieces of bark, pulled away from a trunk, revealed a fine, brown dust, leftovers from many buggy meals. And of course, there were spiders. I found one I do not recognize, and will send my poor photo to the good people at BugGuide.

Black and gold spider, under bark.

I found a centipede, many ants, several millipedes (scooting out of sight in an instant), and eleventy-three woodbugs.

Under the bark of a fallen tree, something has eaten paths in the cambium. An insect larva, maybe? A slug?

Laurie says this is a bitter cherry log.

I noticed several of these logs. The old bark holds on, shredding but still keeping its shape while the wood inside crumbles to dust. Several of the logs were mostly a hollow bark tube.

BC natives used this bark for binding the joints of tools and the hafts of bows, because it is so tough and long-lasting. It is still used as a decorative accent on basket work.

In a well-rotted log, something blue, some sort of fungus infestation.

Insect larva tunnels in the heartwood of an old fallen tree.

In a small semi-clearing, we stood amazed. What is that?

Is that a man in the tree? Or a mermaid?

Zooming in. I think it's a blonde mermaid.

And the tree is a cedar. It looks like it broke off, many years ago, perhaps in a windstorm, and then sprouted side branches curving upwards to become four new trunks. Cedar branches droop down before they turn upwards again; these bare branches show the pattern well.

What a wealth of critters that tree must house!

Something green to rest our eyes. Moss on a rotten stump.

Fur, lace, horses' hooves, and toasted cheese

The best time to visit the forested side hill of the Watershed Park, is after a week or so of solid rain. (Typical BC spring weather, in other words.) Then every downed tree, every stump, every mossy branch shelters mushrooms and slimes. They come in all sizes and shapes, from twisted threads to wide, flat, "cowpie" shrooms, in all colours; purple, blue-green, white, orange and yellow, brown, even black. We scramble over logs and through blackberry patches, getting wet and scratched and muddy, unheeding, following the glimmer of yet another beauty just beside that next stump.

And this year, we missed our window. The weather has been almost summery; we had started the daily watering of the gardens after several days without rain. And the Watershed is dry. The rainy-day mushrooms are gone, disappeared back into the ground until the rains return.

So yesterday's little pearly shrooms were all we could find. Or so it seemed, until we turned our attention to the "boring", as in "always there" polypores, the hard, woody, dull shelf fungi. And there they were; everywhere we looked, and as beautiful, if not as fragile, as the delicate mycenas and glowing orange slimes.

On the standing trees:

Tall birch, still growing, but already home to dozens of polypores.

On fallen logs:

Birch on the ground. And a couple of polypores. The large one is a tinder polypore, aka horse's hoof fungus.

Another two on a birch log. They grow on dead and dying hardwood trees.

A different hardwood. Young maple, maybe? And a broken polypore, showing the brick-red interior.

Back of a shelf polypore, showing it's pen-and-ink scribbles.

Probably a red-belted polypore. These are extremely variable. The fruiting body, usually the bottom while the tree is standing, is white on a young polypore, turning to brown as it ages.

Front view of the same fungus.

Dye polypore. This one is soft and spongy. It grows on dead wood, and on the ground near evergreens.

Young 'uns. Probably red-belted polypore. They look good enough to eat, like toasted cheese bagels with cream cheese. They're not.

Fuzzy brown and white. Unidentified shelf fungus.

Zooming in to show the fur cloaks and lacy petticoats of these fashion-conscious belles.

And some strange trees, tomorrow.

Mushroom appetizer

I've been working far too late, delving into rotting logs . . .

Tiny white mushrooms on crumbling wood, Watershed Park

. . . and now it's too late to show you what I've found. Umpteen photos of polypores, etc, coming tomorrow.

Window to the sky

Under the canopy of the Watershed Park, everything is dim, in deep greens or browns. Except the sky, some days . . .

Bigleaf maples, catching the sunlight, up top.

A Skywatch post.

Cyanide millipede

Among the browns and greens of the leaf litter on the forested slope of Watershed Park, a yellow dotted line appears, moving slowly from one rotting leaf to the next. Don't touch him; he will release toxic cyanide if he's annoyed. It has a pleasant, almond scent, but it will irritate your skin. Let him be; he's busy turning last year's leaves to this year's soil.

Harpaphe haydeniana

This one has 19 or 20 segments, but I couldn't count his feet. Males have 30 pairs, and females 31, for a total of 62 feet. Not the thousand that its name implies.

T'was brillig in the tulgey wood

*Definitions

The Watershed Park in Delta is a mixed forest, evergreens and deciduous trees, crawling down a steep slope between upper Delta and the low, flat farm lands beneath. It is not over-managed; occasionally, someone cuts up trees that have fallen over the paths. Dozens of trees are dead, providing well-used woodpecker feeding and perching spots. Logs not on paths molder and rot; shelf fungus and turkey tail fungus colonize them end to end.

The space beneath the trees harbours both native and invasive plants. The natives: salal, evergreen ferns, salmonberry, red huckleberry, our trailing blackberry, an abundance of mosses and mushrooms. Along the sunny bottom path, stinging nettles, touch-me-nots, and bog plants such as Labrador tea make a dense green wall. The invaders include Himalayan blackberry and English ivy; this year, I noticed a large patch of spotted dead nettle, which is capable of over-running even the ferns.

Spring and fall, after a few rains, we go mushrooming there.

This time, we found few mushrooms; maybe we're too early. Or too late; the weather has been unseasonably warm. We weren't disappointed, though:

Rotting snag, with frass and slime mold

Perhaps because of the warm, wet weather this winter, we found that a surprising number of the trees and snags were losing great slabs of bark; it was cracked and rotted, separated from the tree itself.

Inner side of a flap of bark: frass and small grey slime molds

Some of the old stumps were so rotten that they fell apart, or even fell over, with a touch of a finger. And behind the crumbled bark, and inside the mushy remains of the stumps, small critters feed on the molds and wood. We explored a few of these stumps and snags.

Innards of a still more or less intact stump

Insect tunnels. Can you find the wood bug?

There were wood bugs everywhere; they fell off every piece of bark we moved, out of every crevice we opened. Climbing over a log, I grabbed a branch to steady myself; it crumbled in my hand. And from its stub, a stream of wood bugs poured, like water from a tipped glass. Most were gone by the time I'd crossed the log and clambered up close to the tree, but the hole was still pretty full:

Woodbug convention centre?

More wood bugs.

Then there were the millipedes:

Millipede on frass on inner side of bark.

A pair of  millipedes. The crumbs are the remains of millipede meals; dead wood.

I saw several woven white egg casings; I assumed they were made by spiders:

These were about 1/2 inch long. But what is that black thing underneath?

Hacklemesh Weaver spider. With egg case; or is it a shelter?

I saw one of these in a pile of sawdusty frass, but it scooted down a hole before I got a decent photo. I hadn't even seen this one; it was on the shady side of the tree, and the photo was too dark until I lightened it 'way up. I've never seen a spider like this before, with blue tints and pink - pink! - joints on the legs. And what seems like far too many legs.

I sent my few lousy photos (this was the best of the lot) to BugGuide. And overnight, Lynette Schimming managed to identify it for me, at least down to the family. Yay, BugGuide! And thanks, Lynette!

It's a Hacklemesh Weaver spider, of the family Amaurobiidae.

Most amaurobiids occur in cryptozoic habitats on the forest floor, in and under decomposing logs, in leaf litter, and under rocks. Some... are found in the bark cavities of standing trees and others have been recorded from rocky grasslands, buildings and caves. From BugGuide.

The "many legs" are really the regular 8, but the spider holds them tightly together over it's back (so did the first one I saw), so that they look as if they crossed over each other. (See this one, from Colorado.)

One other bug; another that we didn't see until we looked over the photos. On a shelf mushroom, one of a crowd on a rotting log, we found this cute globular springtail:

Quite large, for a springtail.

Oh, frabjous day!

*Definitions of title vocabulary, from Jabberwocky, here (Wikipedia).

Decidedly amateurish mushroom ID

Last week, I brought home a big mushroom from the Watershed Park, and laid it out to take a spore print. I forgot to read the instructions in my field guide; it's been a long time.

What the book says:

"... cut off the mushroom's stalk close to the base. Place the cap, with the gills or pores facing down, on a piece of white paper. ... Sometimes the spores fall more readily if you place a drop of water on the cap before you cover it. Some mushrooms produce spore prints in a few hours; others take much longer, sometimes overnight."

What I did: the stalk was almost non-existent, and off to the side, so I didn't trim it. I put the cap, gills down, half-and half on a couple of pieces of paper, one white, one deep burgundy (because I didn't have black around at the moment). The two colours are to allow for white spores, which wouldn't show up on the white paper. I touched a wet fingertip to the top of the cap.

And I forgot to cover it.

I'll go back to the beginning. Half-way down the slope of the park, we passed this log:

For several metres down its length, these large grey mushrooms were sprouting. The large one on the left was a bit over four inches long.

They were grey, with a hint of brown, smooth and leathery. Colours are difficult to judge in the shade of these trees, but the drying ferns look about right, and this is the way I remember the mushrooms. I used the flash.

Testing their softness, I accidentally broke a large one off, so it came home with me. It was gilled, with an inrolled rim ...

Freshly harvested, on a log.

... and had a pleasant, "woodsy" scent. The stem, what there was of it, was whitish and wooly.

Microscope photo (40x) of the curly gills near the edge. They are straight for the rest of their length.

Compare to the mushroom on my table, a day later:

Now it is a rich brown, with hints of maroon. The lighting may have something to do with it, but again, I used the flash and corrected for white balance. This is the way it looked to my eyes.

And there is a blowout of spores on the dark paper, nothing visible on the white. But when I lifted the mushroom, there was nothing underneath. I replaced it carefully, and waited another day and a half. When nothing was happening, I gave up and examined the print.

On the burgundy, the sprayed dust looked bluish-gray. On the white, under a bright light, I could distinguish the merest hint of cream, also sprayed off to the side. Under the microscope, at 200x, all I could see was this same faint dust.

I changed the colour balance on this photo, and jacked up the saturation, to highlight the pattern. It seems that the mushroom casts its spores off to the side, instead of just dropping them. Could this be helpful in spreading the colony to the next log? Would it have dropped spores directly beneath the cap if I had remembered to cover it?

Questions, questions.

At least, having done all this, I should be able to identify the mushrooms, right? I think so. As far as I can tell, it is the Late fall oyster, Panellus serotina (-us), common in Europe and here in North America; I found a report from our Sunshine Coast. "Serotinus" means "late"; they fruit after the first frosts.

"The odd variation in cap colors is quite distinctive. This mushroom almost always fruits only after the first frosts of the season. Although considered edible, it is quite tough and must be cooked a long time over low heat." 

(Another, more technical description. "... sometimes bitter ... nausea ...") I don't think I'll plan on sampling the next ones I find.

My fumbling around notwithstanding, I'm pleased. I'll be taking more spore prints in the future. With a cover on top.

Ants'-eye view

Deep in the dim shade of the Watershed Park, sometimes, for relief, we crane our necks to see blue sky far above:

Trees on stilts

Reaching for warmth and sunshine

Beating out the competition.

On an open slope, it's ok to relax.

A Skywatch post

Frozen mushroom medley

We finally got to the Watershed Park to look for mushrooms. It is far too late, of course; the ground is frozen, and the familiar rainy-weather mushrooms have gone into hiding again. It took us a while before our eyes became accustomed to the drab brown of fallen leaves, dead branches, and bare soil so that we could notice the frost-hardy species, mostly smaller, hugging the relative warmth of rotting wood.

I don't recognize any of these, except to place them in a general category; shelves, crusts, tongues, etc.  It didn't help that the light was poor, and mushrooms don't respond well to the flash; their colours often change under bright light, so that a photo of a mushroom that I see as grey turns out almost orange or purple. Whites flash right back, like so many mirrors. I forgot to bring a diffuser. I'll try to remember next time.

These little tongues look like dancing ghosts. Or frozen flames.
Update: probably Carbon Antlers, Xylaria hypoxolon. Thanks, Dave.

Huddled in a depression in the bark. Shrivelled and dried from the cold, anyhow.

These handle the coldest of winters bravely. I never know if they're turkey tails or turkey tail look-alikes.

Small "bookend" fungus. It could be a shelf fungus, but the tree has fallen to expose the underside.

Round, soft-looking "doilies".

One of the "normal" mushrooms, shivering.

Tiny, thick-stemmed mushrooms hiding in a crack.

These are strange; no thicker than a coat of paint. White targets.

I brought a larger grey/maroon mushroom home and am making a spore print. I'll post that tomorrow or Saturday.