The yard is overrun with mushrooms. We’d spot one every now and again before, but the last few days of cool damp have caused an explosion.

There are two varieties. One medium small kind–much bigger than, say, to take an example purely at random Liberty Cap mushrooms but a bit smaller than, again, purely randomly, just pullin’ this out of the air, Psilocybin cubensis–has a pinky-orange cap, no spots over white gills, flesh, and stem. Something likes this mushroom very much, because I keep finding them chewed, the gills sticking out like spokes of a broken umbrella or the red veil (?) licked off.

They’re welcome to it. I’ll confine my taxonomic adventures to birding. It may occasionally be frustrating, but nobody ever died on the difference between Epidomax flycatchers.

The other mushroom may be more widespread, or possibly I just see it because nothing wants to eat it. It’s a big dirty-grey-white thing with a squat, thick stem and cream colored gills, growing singly and in clumps across the lawn and to a lesser extent, under the beech tree in the back yard. They straggle across the yard in a rough line, as if the fairies had given up that ring dancing crap and started practicing the tango.

The mature shrooms are the size of a saucer, and like many mushrooms, they start out rounded and convex, then flip up into an irregular concave shape with a round dimple in the middle, and several small brownish rings around the dimple. When decaying, they turn a murky turquoise, but they do not bruise blue. (Hey, old habits die hard…)

The sample that I pulled up had fuzzy white spots around the base, but I don’t know if that may have been mold or not.

It’s pouring rain at the moment, so I can’t take any photos, but possibly tomorrow…