A spot of cheer

I'm ending up the year posting photos of mushrooms. Maybe that's appropriate; many of them grow, preferably, in the secret dark.

But down there in the dark, there are still flashes of light and colour.

Orange mushrooms, Miracle Beach woods.

Orange jelly, possibly. Oyster Bay woods.

Witches' Butter? Oyster Bay woods. I like the way the sun shining through it warms the shadows.

Witches' Butter and Orange Jelly are difficult to distinguish without much close inspection. I could easily — easily — have mis-identified them.

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Termino el año subiendo fotos de hongos. Tal vez sea lo más apropriado; la mayoría de los hongos se hallan creciendo en lugares secretos y oscuros. Como lo fue este año.

Pero allí en la oscuridad, todavía hay rayos de luz y color. Como estos hongos amarillos y anaranjados.

1. Sin identificación.

2. Probablemente Dacrymyces palmatus, "gelatina anaranjada".

3. Tremella mesenterica, "mantequilla de brujas". Creo. Puedo estar equivocada.

Estos dos últimos se confunden facilmente; sin un examen con más detalle.

Layers upon layers

The trunk of an old deciduous, lichen-covered tree sprouted orange flower look-alikes.

Orange crispy, on a lichen-covered deciduous tree, Tyee Spit.

I've walked past this tree dozens of times, and never noticed these before. They are quite noticeable, even from a distance.

I touched them; they're hard, dry, firmly attached to the tree. Not jelly-like at all. A dry witches butter. It had been a couple of days since it rained.

These two clumps are about an inch and a half across.

These are much smaller. The front one looks like its pushing its way out from inside the bark.

The fungus grows parasitically on the mycelium of wood-rotting corticioid fungi in the genus Peniophora. (Wikipedia)

The Peniophora are crust fungi that infect and decompose wood. Looking at photos, I realize that I've seen them without paying enough attention. So basically, the witches' butter is a parasite on a parasite.

So, naturalists observe, a flea

Has smaller fleas that on him prey;

And these have smaller still to bite 'em,

And so proceed ad infinitum.

(Jonathan Swift, 1667 - 1745)