The Next Hike

Check here every week for details on the next Trekker hike!

Friday, June 22, 2012

Next Hike

The next hike will be on Saturday, 23rd June.
We meet at the Ballpark in Gillies Bay at 10am.

On a recent hike I photographed a very distinctive type of fungus that is quite unmistakable in appearance.  It's really quite common, but being so small it probably gets overllooked by many people.  The very odd shape is rather like a very tiny china teacup of the type that have no handle, and the contents of the cup look like miniature flying saucers which, in a way, they really do become. The brownish "eggs" in these tiny nests are actually the spore cases which are dispersed when rain drops land on them and flip them out to some distance away from the cup where they were produced.  In my photo you can see a couple of empty grey spore cases resting on the bark.  There are several species of Birds Nest Fungus in our area and I don't know whether or not this one might be the more common Nidula candida.
JD.
 

 
Birds Nest Fungus with and without spore case "eggs".

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