I’m compelled to send one more email about mushrooms before summer is a distant memory. One reason is that I want to share this lovely cascade of mushrooms and moss down the trunk of a tree, spotted by my hiking companion one day in the middle of August.
The other reason is that I hiked by the puffball mushrooms again a couple of weeks ago. I’d totally forgotten about them and in fact didn’t see them as I walked by. But just a few steps later, I recognized the dried, shrunken remnant of my young friend’s giant mushroom.1 I backtracked and sure enough, there were still a couple of puffball mushrooms in the same place as before. They looked as if they’d already been punctured but I decided to try again, this time on video. As I had the last time, I used the tip of my hiking stick to poke each of the mushrooms.
As you can see, there were still plenty of spores to puff out in small clouds of dust. It was even more satisfying to get the puffs on video2 than it was to create them.
If this doesn’t make sense, you might want to read the original puffball mushroom email.
If the video won’t run from your email, please click here to go directly to YouTube.
So cool!
The glory of it all!