Nature Noticings

There's always a little thrill to discovering something new and strange about something that seems very familiar.  Yesterday I was reading The Art of Noticing newsletter by Rob Walker , and he had a link to an Oakland Garden Club newsletter  article by Alexis Madrigal . She mentioned a volunteer fava bean plant in her garden that she can't bring herself to pull out. She likes to watch ants climb up to the extrafloral nectaries.  WHAT? I have grown fava beans for years and years, and had no idea about this. Fava beans are delicious, if labor intensive (you have to shell them AND peel the beans individually, unless you eat them very young). In a mild year, they can overwinter in Seattle, so sometimes I plant them in October. I didn't do that last year, luckily, because they wouldn't have been able to cope with our really cold snap in January, when it got down to 17 °  F.  I did plant some this spring, though, so I was out the door into the garden and crouched down...

Look at that log. Looks kind of gross, right? It looks like mold growing on it. Or maybe a crust fungus.  But wait, look closer. Look really, really close. Oh! Look at this! Tiny, ethereal fingers that almost glow in the dark! It's spring, so we've had some good rain, and then this weekend it warmed up to summertime temperatures. Apparently the coral slime mold took that as a cue to get busy. When we went hiking at Tiger Mountain last weekend, we found patch after patch of coral slime mold ( Ceratiomyxa fruticulosa ) - we counted nine spots along the trail where they were growing on logs or stumps, including the ones you see pictured above. I love that something kind of yucky looking resolves into something truly lovely if you take the time to look closely. I suppose the name "slime mold" doesn't really help with public opinion much, either. Such cool organisms deserve a better common name. Slime molds are not fungi, but are in the kingdom Protista, a catch-all ca...

Last weekend we went on an osprey quest. Ospreys summer and nest here, but migrate to the southern US or Mexico in the winter. We drove all around Lake Washington, looking for our first osprey of the year, stopping at various parks along the way. No luck anywhere. But of course there were many small and wonderful things. In fact, we saw so many things that I've had trouble getting myself to sit down and write - there's too much to say all at once! So I'll just write about one thing for now. I recently read The Hidden Kingdom of Fungi by Keith Seifert (Greystone Books, 2022). Seifert focuses on microfungi rather than the mushrooms we are more familiar with. He wrote about barrage zones, which are the dark cells that form lines or walls at the edge of a fungus' territory. Specifically, he was writing about fungus growing in dead wood. The barrage zones help keep other individuals out of their territory. When enough individuals are growing in the same wood, you get beau...