Ruffles, pimples, bones in the forest.

It's always dark under the trees at Hoomak Lake. Even on bright, sunny days. The canopy overhead is dense, the hillside steep, casting a permanent shadow. On a wet winter day in the rain, the forest is so dim that colours are leached out. Only by the shore does green show up as green.  The camera has a trick that my eyes can't match; it turns on the flash.

It showed me these mosses and lichens on the trunks of red alder trees.

It looks like Tree ruffle liverwort, and an unidentified moss.

Impossible to identify

The longer view. Leaf lichens, tree barnacle, and the moss.

Zooming in on another tree. Baby leaf lichen, and bark barnacle.

The leaf lichen, I think, is what my guide book calls "hooded bone" and Wikipedia calls "monk's hood lichen", Hypogymna physodes. Or one of the common Hypogymna species, of which 17 are found in BC. E-Flora explains that these lichens are called bone lichens because of "... the hollow lobes of the species and the pale, often whitish, upper cortex."

The bark barnacle is another common lichen, growing mainly on alder trunks. It is a crust lichen, barely visible; what draws our attention, and gives it its name, are the round fruiting bodies, tiny blisters (another site calls them "pimples") with an open pore in the centre.

And on the ground beneath the trees, wherever the light reaches in, I see step moss.

Step moss, alder leaves, and a shiny leaf moss (upper right).

More step moss and alder leaves. With salal leaves; these are evergreen, always bright, always glossy.

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 Siempre está oscuro alrededor del lago Hoomak. Cuando el sol brilla, y más en el bosque invernal, en la lluvia. La cubierta forestal es densa, el terreno empinado, manteniendo todo en sombra. En un dia gris, es tan oscuro que los ojos casi no pueden distinguir los colores. Solamente en la orilla del lago entra suficiente luz para que lo verde se vea como verde. Pero mi cámara tiene un truco que no tienen mis ojos; el flash.

Y el flash me mostró estos líquenes y musgos en los troncos de alisos rojos.

Fotos:

1. Parece ser la hepática "fleco de árbol", Porella navicularis. Y un musgo sin identificar.
2. Musgos que no pude identificar.
3. Vista de una sección más larga del tronco, El musgo, y los líquenes Thelotrema lepadinum y Hypogymna physodes.
4. En otro aliso, un brote nuevo del líquen Hypogymna physodes, y el "bálano de corteza", Thelotrema lepadinum.

El líquen folioso, creo, es el que llaman "hueso con capuchón". Wikipedia le da el nombre de "capuchón de monje". O puede ser otro del mismo género, del cual hay 17 en esta provincia. E-Flora explica que se le ha dado el nombre de "hueso", porque, dice, "los lóbulos son huecos, y la corteza es pálida, casi blanco a veces".

El "bálano de corteza" es otro líquen muy común que crece principalmente en los troncos de los alisos. Es un líquen incrustante, apenas visible. Lo que salta a la vista son los cuerpos fructíforos; las ampollitas (granos, les llaman otros) que se abren por medio de un poro central.

Y en el suelo debajo de los árboles al mero borde del agua, donde le llega la luz, se halla el musgo "de escalera", Hylocomium splendens.

2 fotos: el musgo, con hojas de alder, y un musgo de hojas grandes en la parte superior a la derecha, y (segunda foto) hojas de salal, 

Trying to understand

Mosses are confusing enough. But Ma Nature likes to have us completely bewildered. So we have liverworts, which look like mosses, act like mosses, and grow intermingled with mosses. Our guide on the moss walk kept pointing out bits of green that looked like all the other bits of green, and calling them liverworts. Even with the hand lens I was carrying, I couldn't see the difference.

"And what is that one?"

Everything's somewhere on the web, if you look long enough. I found a site from Australia that explains the difference so clearly that even I can see it.

First, look for sporophytes, the spore-bearing capsules.

The green or red capsules are sporophytes, growing spores.

It's always possible, and very easy, to determine whether you have a moss, liverwort or hornwort if sporophytes are present. Remember that a sporophyte consists of a spore capsule, with or without a supporting stalk or seta.

Are groups of spore capsules held aloft on complex structures?
The bryophyte is a liverwort.

A fuzzy head, like a pussy willow or a grass ear, would be a complex structure. If the "moss" has those, it's a liverwort.

If the stem is translucent (and often colourless) the bryophyte in question is almost certainly a liverwort.

If the stalk supporting the capsule is opaque and coloured green, brown or red the bryophyte in question is a moss.

 If sporophytes are absent you'll naturally need to look at some gametophyte features, the first step being to see whether you have a thallose or a leafy bryophyte. A thallose bryophyte is either a liverwort or a hornwort. A leafy bryophyte is either a moss or a liverwort.

(Hornworts are aquatic; we can ignore them for now.)

If the plant has no clear stems or leaves, it is thallose, and therefore a liverwort.

The first thing to do is to see whether you have a thallose or a leafy bryophyte. The almost leathery thallus of a robust thallose bryophyte is fairly easy to pick. Similarly, in some leafy species the leaves-on-stems growth habit is very easy to see. 

For this, with some of the plants, we need a lens; some liverwort thalli look like stems and leaves to the naked eye.

So the photo above is clearly a moss. The sporophytes are simple, held on a tall stalk, with red tints. The leaves grow attached to the stems, not as continuations of the stem. (Look at the stem below the red sporophyte on the right.)

In the great majority of moss species the mature spore capsule opens by means of a well-defined mouth. Remember that a liverwort spore capsule never has a well-defined mouth.

To see that, a lens is probably needed. And being there at the right time, when the spores are mature, or already released.

There is much more info on the page I'm quoting, details on how to distinguish thallose from leafy structures, photos, and exceptions to the rules. (Aren't there always?) But the sporophyte detail is enough for a rough guide, for now, for me.

The moss is green and leafy; even in this photo, the stems are visible as a separate structure from the leaves. The liverwort is one of the leafy ones; the leaves are short and stubby. Luckily, it's red.

Hanging millipede

"Don't touch this," our guide said. She was pointing at a fallen branch covered with small, purplish-brown leaves. "Some people are allergic to it," she added. We clustered around, looking, but keeping our distance.

Frullania nisquallensis, "Hanging millipede liverwort".

It's not a moss, but a liverwort*. It grows on alder and maple; in this particular bit of forest, the large deciduous trees are mostly maples. And it may cause contact dermatitis, which gives it an alternate name: "Woodman's eczema".

Good to know, if you're scrambling about in the rain forest. I Googled it and read a few reports; contact with the wet bark or with fallen fragments of the liverwort can cause an eczema that lasts several weeks. Gloves are no protection, unless they're waterproof and no water seeps in through the wrists, but most eruptions are on the face and other exposed areas. It seems to be no problem in dry weather.

Frullania nisquallensis, commonly known as Hanging millipede liverwort, is a reddish-brown species of liverwort in the Jubulaceae family. It is found in western Washington and British Columbia, including Vancouver Island. The plant grows in mats, sometimes in mats that hang from tree branches (particularly those of alders, or maples), or growing close to the substrate. (Wikipedia) (My emphasis)

That explains the "hanging" part of the name, "hanging millipede." It doesn't look much like a millipede to me, though. There's a whole page of photos on INaturalist, which may be helpful if you're planning to go looking for firewood on a wet day. But stay dry!

*More on this, later.