Journal 3

Writing today was extremely hard because it was extremely hot and sunny and I was sweating. The harsh sun was also giving me a headache and I got quite dehydrated. So today, instead of just standing and clicking pictures I decided to explore around my field site. This was useful as it also helped me look for the fungi/lichen needed for today’s assignment. I decided to go behind the big tree at my site.

I had never explored that area before due to the fact that the shrubs surrounding this tree make the area behind it quite inaccessible but today I decided to brave it. The seeds from a plant in front of the tree got stuck on my clothes. They were quite pointy and later that afternoon I had to spend 15minutes getting them all out. The area behind the tree was quite different. the soil here was wetter as it was bordering the lake. There were many pieces of rotting wood. The big tree itself had no leaves but it did have a variety of organisms growing on it.

I identified this lichen with the help of iNaturalist and found it to be Xanthoria parietina (Maritime Sunburst Lichen). The lichen is yellowish-green in color and appears to look “leafy” or foliose. 

 As you can see, there are two different colors of lichen growing here.I do not know if these are the same species or not since there appears to be small variation in appearance.

I also saw this mushroom:

So far, I have not been able to identify this species.

By this time my shoes started sinking into the wet mud so I decided to come back into the open and looked around for more mushrooms. I saw the ones I saw last week again except some of them looked like they were close to dying.

This is the picture of them from last time:

The cap is a dull yellow/white darkening towards the center. The cap it pretty large and shaped like a small plate. As can be seen it doesn’t have a uniform shape though it mostly is round.

I found two other fungi that I could not identify:

and

(I went through iNaturalist and I think this could be a meadow mushroom)

After all of this though, I would like to add that fungi and lichen are really hard to identify. When I was going through my field guide, the internet and iNaturalist, most species looked very similar to me and even within a species there was a lot of diversity in shape, color and size so it is very likely that my identifications of these species could be wrong.