On the Road is a weekday feature spotlighting reader photo submissions.
From the exotic to the familiar, whether you’re traveling or in your own backyard, we would love to see the world through your eyes.
Good morning, everybody,
A solid Thanks to TaMara for the past two days, I’m still off-kilter, but I expect my laptop repair Thursday so the end is in sight!
Another day, more pics from previous mushroom hunts.
Enjoy, I’ll try to answer questions previous and new.
Chipmunk damage, but also an older bolete – note the yellow gunk. I think of it like crab/lobster goo – you CAN eat it, and I’m sure someone considers it a delicacy, but it’s trash as far as I’m concerned. I scrape the red caps clean of that yellow crap.
An awesome cluster-find. When folks ask “why king boletes?”, I smile and explain: “it’s like a gold rush – you make a find, collect it, and then as you’re getting up, you see another cluster even better than you just found and then as you scurry over to claim and harvest it, you see three more.”
This is exemplary, close to 5 pounds fresh. I failed to be as precise as I am now as you can see by the cloggy-dirt at the base of the bigger pair.
An Amanita Muscaria, quite gorgeous.
This was from my yard in June 2010. We had this amazing tarantula living on our property. Each September you’d see them marching back to their burrows to overwinter. Amazing lifeforms.
So we had a “volunteer” from a house a block or so away take up in the front yard next to the road in an empty spot where a fruit tree had failed. I let this plant grow and it was an amazing thing. Once it flowered I could identify it – Jimsonweed, or as I knew it, datura.
I never used it, but the flower was amazing. It would open at dusk and expire the next morning. The opening was a wonder of nature – the stalk would shake and tremor and the petals would unfurl a bit, then a pause (as, I imagined, more liquid was pumped into chambers and tubes). You could HEAR it. An amazing thing and I’ll try to dig up some video with audio to share.
Have a great day, everybody.
Wanderer
Great photos. A lovely way to start the day.
Chris T.
A flower is, after all, an organ of reproduction. It’s just the plant version of, well, you know. :-)
Tony Jay
Scrolls through mushroom pics.
That’s an odd looking mushroom
(peers closer)
That almost looks like….
(Cold. So cold. Why can’t I move? What’s that screeching noise? Is it me? Is this what death is?)
I don’t think I can ever forgive you for this. You are worse than Brexit*.
*At this present moment in time. Things can change.
chopper
kill with fire!
given the loving attitude towards the spider, i find this claim dubious. you done smoked that loco weed, didnya
Steve in the ATL
This is quite different from the Colorado mushroom hunts some of my college friends went on
zhena gogolia
@Tony Jay:
Haha, that’s me exactly!
zhena gogolia
That Amanita looks like the character Stormy compared Trump to.
J R in WV
Y’all do KNOW not to eat the pretty red ‘shroom with the little white freckles, don’cha?
Now you do! DON’T eat the Amanita Muscaria, no matter HOW gorgeous~!!~
Probably don’t need that warning for the itty bitty spider monster, but here it is too. SO not a mushroom… but still interesting. I hear there’s crowds of them moving in the fall. Herds even!
joel hanes
Smoking or otherwise ingesting datura is certainly more dangerous than that tarantula.
Henry
In my late teens, I ate quite a few Amanita’s, 3 or 4 at a time. I had quite a good trip from them although I would not eat them anymore.
w3ski
Phaedrus
Where are you located Alain? I’m in Northern Arizona and like mushroom hunting as well – but mostly lobster mushrooms because they’re easy to identify. Also, tarantulas, but infrequent. Datura grows lower down – so all those things together makes me think we might not be to far away!
Cheers