January 14, 2005 [LINK]

Winter fungus: "Witch's Butter"!

Orange wood ear? Even in the middle of January one can find some of Mother Nature's colorful beauty if you just look hard enough. While strolling through the nearby woods in a rather unproductive search for birds today (very cold and wet all of a sudden!), I came across this bright yellow-orange fungus with a jelly-like consistency. It is not in my copy of A Field Guide to Southern Mushrooms, but it is similar enough to the "Wood ear" fungus that I was able to narrow down my Google search. I soon determined that it is member of the species Tremella mesenterica, or "Witch's Butter" in the vernacular. Yum!? You can read all about it from "Mushroom Expert" at XXXXXX. What would we do without Google??? [NOTE: On Feb. 11, 2006 I was told by someone viewing this Web site that the link previously included here no longer functions, so I have deleted it.]

UPDATE: Thanks to Lynn Mitchell for pointing out the obvious fact that the wrong year has been displaying in nearly all blog entries since January 4. Fortunately, BBEdit has a superb search-and-replace function that let me fix that very quickly.