Monday 26 September 2011

More Stars than Hollywood

Local naturalist Barry Warrington has made yet another interesting find, and yesterday he offered to show me the results. I made the trip to the lonely wilds of East Yorkshire & we popped into some scraps of woodland behind a tacky supermarket to see the stars in all their glory. Last week Barry counted at least 93 of them, and they were still present in all different stages of development. I came across a few of these at Spurn several years ago, and I've shown my groups a handful at Potteric Carr, but I'd never seen such fine examples, or so many. There were also some Fly Agarics, some Blushers, Birch Polypores, Hoof Fungus, Common Earthball, some puffball, some Candle-Snuff, and several species to which it wasn't possible to put a name. It's amazing that such an apparently uninspiring scrap of woodland could hold so many interesting species of fungi.

Collared Earth-Star at Full Magnitude
Collared Earth-Star - on the wane
Collared Earth-Star - one just opening up
The Blusher
Another Earth-Star Species at Potteric Carr
Unidentified Fungi Species
Shaggy Parasol
Common Earthball

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Great pictures !!! I love fungi hunting and that's a fine collection with some of the 'stars' of British mycology. The yellow one is certainly one of the 'yellow' Russula's, but which is unclear. Do you have any images with the gills showing ?

Michael Flowers said...

I've seen many species of Russula, but it didn't look like any I've ever seen before. The picture doesn't really do justice to the fungi I saw! Unfortunately, I didn't get any pics of the gills!