Minutes From Home
We head out into the fine mist of a damp evening, just getting dark, ostensibly to look for mushrooms, not foraging exactly, but just to see what’s come up in the last damp days. First off we see clumps of Ghost Pipe, having pushed up through and some still wearing caps of dead leaves. Next we notice all the Ladyslippers, whose flowers have shriveled back to a brown shred and now sport a narrow green hood at the top of their stems, waiting for seeds to develop. There are little yellow mushrooms, little brown mushrooms, tiny orange ones, nibbled Russalas, knocked over stems – all the animals have been feeding. In the clay stuck to the roots of a fallen tree we see a Black Widow. There’s a dried up flower of One-flowered Cancer Root and one of those has a bulbous white seed. There are flowers of Spotted Wintergreen, which it always amuses me to say “is not spotted and is not a true wintergreen.” But, for me, best are the green lights. Everywhere our headlamps shine we see little green lanterns. If you keep your eye on one and make a beeline toward it (tricky in the dark, wet wood full of limbs and dips) you will find a spider waiting for you. We home in on 3 nursery web spiders (Pisaurina mira) this way and stop to examine them. One of them is cramming some critter into its mouth.
Wandering around the perimeter of your own house, you’d think it would be hard to get lost. But if what you’re doing is puttering around in the dark, moving from one glimpse of an interesting sight to the next with a comparatively dim headlamp, it’s actually not difficult to get turned around in circles.
Where Are We?
It begins to rain harder and I’m ready to go home and we head back toward the house. Except, as we keep going, I wonder where is the house? As we plunge on, I’m noticing things I’ve never seen before. Where did all these big blow-down trees come from?
Are they on the East side and I just hadn’t seen them when headed down to the “back garden” (the native species plantings in our septic field)? Now we are going uphill – that’s not right. R. says we should follow a ditch made by heavy rain – if you follow water you’ll get to a creek and eventually you will know where you are. Well, yes, that’s what I would to do too (and have done many times) in daylight, but I don’t want to take that long to be “lost” in these conditions. Where are we? Deeper and deeper into the neighbor’s property, I’m guessing, for sure. Good thing it isn’t hunting season. Finally the rain begins to pelt and I dig out my US Topo app.
This situation calls for features I’ve never used, though R. has, so he gives me the tour on my phone: make a way point and then choose “go to” so it’ll draw a line and then give you a compass arrow you use to get to that waypoint. The base map clearly shows the road off of which our driveway juts, so that’s the waypoint I select. As we duck around fallen trees and the pits they leave, under now-drenched and drooping beech branches, over even more blow-down trees, the arrow wobbles but after a mere 5 minutes or so, a yellow light shines out in the distance – the house!
Coming in the mud-room door we get a final treat for the evening, a female Io moth flutters in to rest where we can snap pictures and usher her out before the cat gets interested.
The Eye
The next afternoon……….Virginia summer has arrived hot, hazy and humid. A brief walk, no plans to look for fungi at all, but they keep appearing. First off you have to understand that I haveThe Eye with me— my eldest— who from childhood has had the ability to notice things no one else sees in the woods and elsewhere in nature. Today is no different. First they notice little cup-shaped fungi, a bit greenish in hue that look a little like miniature acorn caps turned over. Later we see these everywhere, and as they grow larger they get browner and increasingly look exactly like—acorn caps. I think now that I have been seeing these frequently and have never once doubted—that they were acorn caps.
Eventually the upward curl smooths down and develops scallops, and they look more like we expect a little brown mushroom to look. But in their youth they are projecting to mice and voles and possums and all those hungry for a mushroom feast “don’t eat me—I’m a woody acorn cap.”
We’re now walking along and talking about how all the typical pale yellowy-orange chanterelles we notice (well, The Eye notices) are just getting started; they’re not yet big enough to gather, when what to our wondering eyes should appear—not miniature reindeer―but a Christmas in June anyhow: black trumpets. An anomaly we thought—mushrooms we usually see in the fall unaccountably sprung up in the summer, a damp spell following a cold patch. But as we walk, suddenly they’re everywhere. The keen eye also has a trusty foraging knife at hand. We talk about the controversy among those who care about the most sustainable way to forage fungi— studies have been conducted, but no definitive answers yet—should we cut the fruiting bodies at the stem and leave the mycelium unharmed or, in the long run, are these fungi so powerfully spread out underground that hauling one up by the stem and getting some of the mycelium too will do not long-term harm? Either way, we are cutting them this time and placing them in a mesh bag (well perhaps this forethought suggests we were hopeful if not exactly planning on foraging) so the spores can disperse as we walk along—bringing a June bonanza to someone else (or us) next season.
Toward the end of the walk we find a large patch that look so exactly like the fallen oak leaves scattered all around that we realize we have seen this strategy before: “I’m a desiccated oak leaf—not tasty.”
I can’t even eat these. Am still doing a FODMAP re-introduction diet and am not yet sure of mushrooms. But I have learned I can gently heat them in a lot of olive oil to extract the flavor, and that’s the plan. So I take a small share and the rest goes home with The Eye. By the way The Eye insists their sibling is far keener at spotting mushrooms, so I know who to walk with when I can get the mushroom thing figured out.
Dark and Rainy, But I’m Not Lost
This evening, I’m not going to wander in the woods looking from green reflective spider eye to eye—there’s no need! R. has comes inside to announce, “the eggs have hatched.” I know we already mourned when a snake got the second brood of bluebird eggs, so I have no idea what he means. “What eggs?” “The Nursery Web Spider,” he says. OK. Boots on, headlamp attached, out I go to look at the enormously tall cup leaf plant with its huge perfoliate leaves. Yes, there’s one leaf bent over, protecting what was merely an egg this afternoon—but has transformed into scores of tiny spider babies—and as we keep looking we see that all over the plant there are other Nursery Web Mamas hovering near their hatchlings, protecting the flocks. The cup plant is a virtual apartment building for nursery web spiders, it seems. Glad to visit without being directionally challenged!
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