Nature Noticings

Here's one of my favorite weird small things (I could probably start a hundred posts with that line, I have so many favorite weird small things). As well as being weird and small, it's very beautiful. This is called map fungus ( Coccomyces dentatus ), and it colonizes only dead Oregon grape ( Berberis aquifolium ) leaves, so is a decomposer rather than a parasite. The boundaries between areas on the "map" truly are boundaries. They separate genetic individuals.  The dark spots are where spores form. If you look closely, they are actually tiny hexagonal pyramids. Here they are at 20x.  They open up along the seams, starting at the tip, to release the spores: tiny Egyptian treasure houses. These leaves came from a hike on Squak Mountain near Seattle today, but I've found it in Seward Park and other wooded areas. Note: I might be light on posting for the next month or so: it's March Mammal Madness time, and we'll be doing some traveling as well.

March is the doldrums of the school year. Luckily, spring is springing hard (even though we haven't quite got to the equinox yet), and there is so much happening in the woods and in the garden. In both the woods and the garden, I love to look for small, strange, and wonderful things. Hazel flowers are small, strange, and wonderful things that mark the coming of spring. We saw the draping male flowers on Tiger Mountain a few weeks ago, but hadn't yet seen any of the tiny female flowers, in spite of some hard looking. Then we spotted some on a walk through our neighborhood last weekend. I'm not sure if the plants we found were our native beaked hazel, or a cultivated variety. They were growing in semi-maintained hedgerows. The male flowers are more familiar: long dangling catkins that exude pollen, like these. If you look closely at the picture above, though, you can also spot the female flowers huddled close to the twigs. Here is a closer view of one. They are a bright, clea...