Lifted from the album, Wednesday afternoon, September 30, 2020. Posted Monday night, October 5.
I'd never thought that I would see a fungus as lovely as the tree it’s helping to return to the soil: Bracket Fungi on a dead maple by the road along the Wallkill River to the transfer station. Wednesday afternoon around one, September 30, 2020.
Fungi are not my area of expertise---as if when it comes to observing nature I have any expertise; I’m a rank amateur and hobbyist---or interest. I tend to look past mushrooms and their fungous ilk at the trees and birds in their vicinity. But every now and then, one or a cluster will catch my eye, like this one did on my way to the transfer station this morning. I can’t recall ever seeing any this color before. It startled and delighted me and I couldn’t wait to get back home to look it up. I didn’t have a name for it until I did. It’s called Bracket fungi. Another name for it is Sulphur Shelf. My “Peterson Field Guide to the Ecology of Eastern Forests" gives both names but seems to prefer Brackets for the concision of it and for alliteration---clusters of Brackets are “bouquets”. Brackets can be brown, white, red, mahogany, or, apparently, as orange as pumpkins. Right now, this bouquet is providing the most fall-like colors on this stretch of road. Leaves are turning hereabouts, and there are maples showing red, yellow, and orange, but down by the river the trees are mostly still green. I don’t remember seeing this bouquet when I was out this way on Saturday, but they’re mushrooms and mushrooms spring up overnight when it’s been rainy, and we’ve had a good soaking since Saturday. It’s bright and sunny this afternoon, but it rained again overnight and the roads and the ground are still wet and marked with puddles.
As with the turning of leaves, what you’re looking at when you're looking at a bouquet of Brackets is more than prettified scenery. It’s a process---a process of decay, decomposition, and the coming of winter, if you want to look at it that way. If you’re more forward-looking, you see regeneration and the coming of spring. To look at it either way, however, is to look at it schematically, to study a part instead of the whole. Decomposition and regeneration are interlocking parts of the process.
Actually, it’s getting toward the end of the process for a while. Fungi do most of their work during early spring and on into late fall; the growing season. Winter cold hardens their food supply and makes it difficult for fungus to eat into wood and fallen leaves and sends the birds and small animals and insects that break up the leaf litter and bore into the wood into hibernation or off to warmer climes. Or it kills them. Come spring, everybody gets back to work, birds, rodents, bugs, and fungi together. Spring is an un-growing season as well as a growing one.
Fungi start their work underground. “A typical forest-dwelling fungus," says Peterson, "exists as a dense, irregularly shaped, underground network” of thin strands called hyphae that weave themselves together into “mycelium” that grow up onto and into food sources. The brackets that give Brackets their name are “reproductive structures”, that is, fruit, and provide shelter for spores that birds and insects feeding on the brackets will inadvertently dust themselves with and carry off to deposit where the new Brackets will sprout and begin their climbs. What the birds and insects don’t take away, rain and wind will, and the twinned process of decomposition and regeneration expands to a new company outlet.
Last note for now. Peterson tells me:
“Fungi lack chlorophyll and so cannot photosynthesize. They must take in complex chemicals, the carbohydrates, fats, and proteins, just as animals do. Because of this need, all fungi, like all animals, depend on being able to obtain organic material.” And so: “Mycelial networks penetrate soil, dead leaves, branches, logs, animal carcasses, feces, and often living root systems. Some, like the notorious Athlete’s Foot fungus, penetrate naturalists.”
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