An entire ecosystem depends on the bark of this one tree in Mount Lebanon: moss, lichens, a bug, and tiny mushrooms. How tiny are they? Below is a left index finger for scale.
A lichen expert would probably know right away what kind of lichen these are, but Father Pitt does not. He always appreciates help in the comments. The color is one of old Pa Pitt’s favorites in all of nature.
These look to Father Pitt like Porcini or Penny-Buns (Boletus edulis). But he is not a mushroom expert. If they turn out to be Death Caps or Doom Shrooms, you have only yourself to blame if you ignored his warning: Don’t eat mushrooms unless you know with absolute certainty that they don’t want to kill you.
“Two stops underexposed!” says the camera. “Nuts to you!” says the photographer. Manual exposure was necessary to keep the spots of sunshine from being blasted out into solid white.
You may notice that Father Pitt keeps returning to this one scene the way Monet kept returning to his water lilies. Not that old Pa Pitt compares himself to Monet, but there are certain rewards for the artist in returning to the same subject in different lights and different seasons. Getting to know the one place intimately reveals the changes wrought by time and light.
A rabbit pauses while grazing on Herr’s Island (or Washington’s Landing, as it likes to be called these days).
An American Toad (Anaxyrus americanus) along the Trillium Trail in Fox Chapel.
Everyone loves the mushrooms, it seems. So here are some more. The weather has been very kind to mushrooms lately, and we found all these within a very small area. Father Pitt is not going to try to identify them, so if any readers happen to know their mushrooms, comments would be much appreciated.
Normally Father Pitt calls them “mushrooms,” but this one, fresh out of the ground, looked so much like a storybook toadstool that one expected to see a slightly grumpy fairy sitting under it. This is almost certainly the same species as the Russula mushrooms we featured earlier, since it grew in the same patch of shady lawn.
