This pretty little mushroom is probably some kind of Cortinarius, but I'm not sure. All I really know is that it has beautiful brick red gills and was found growing in Oregon, around 2500 feet of elevation, on 10-31-04.
Oregon is far enough south of Seattle that the fungi are quite different. Western Oregon still has chanterelles, and Eastern Oregon has matsutake, but many of the other species either grow in different distribution (for instance, Hydnum umbilicatum, one of the sweet
tooth fungi, is small and rare in Washington, but big fat ones were practically carpeting the forest floor in Oregon), or are different species entirely... as the examples below.
This pretty little mushroom is probably some kind of Cortinarius, but I'm not sure. All I really know is that it has beautiful brick red gills and was found growing in Oregon, around 2500 feet of elevation, on 10-31-04.
More fuzzy mushrooms! You may be getting the impression that fuzzy mushrooms are common. They aren't, really, I just take pictures of all of the ones I see. I really love the shades of brown on this little guy. And no, I don't know what it is, either, but it was photographed on 11-3-04.
The mushroom is a diminutive relative of the yellow chanterelle: Cantharellus tubaeformis or the yellow foot chanterelle. It is rumored to be tasty but I found them rather bland and a little unpleasant.
The cool thing about this photo, of course, is the bug in the photo. The mushroom is about 1 ½ cm in diameter, making the bug about 3 to 5 mm. He looks just like a little scorpion, doesn't he? I didn't put him on my finger to see if he'd pinch, but I didn't see any stinger on the end of his tail to imply that he really is a baby scorpion. I haven't the faintest idea what he is, other than deeply confused about being dragged to Washington in a bag of mushrooms. Update: through the miracle of the internet, I have identified this guy as some kind of false scorpion. It turns out there are 3,300 species of pseudoscorpion in the world, I don't know which one this is. The other cool thing is that this is a mutant mushroom: notice that there is a tiny mushroom of cap tissue emerging from the folds next to the bug.
The same shot at close to actual resolution... as you can see, just a little out of focus, but not bad for photographing something that small that wasn't thrilled about getting its picture taken. This photo was taken on 11-3-04.
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