Ponkapoag Pond, May 7, 2000
This page combines two older lichen and fungi photo pages into one cleaner page. The original pages were mostly photo collections, including the Ponkapoag Pond lichen walk from May 7, 2000, the group photo, and several other fungi and woodland detail photos from the same era.
I am leaving room here for more narrative to be added later, so the photos can eventually be woven into the story of how I became interested in lichens, fungi, small forest details, field biology, and the kind of quiet nature walks where you slow down enough to really see what is growing around you.
I’ve Always Been a Fungi!
I’ve always been a fungi! When I lived in New England for 19 years in the woods, every damp stretch of summer brought thousands of mushrooms of every type, spread out through the woods, growing on trees, coming up from the forest floor, and appearing almost everywhere I looked.
I took several courses on both mushrooms and lichens, and I had books for identifying them, making spore prints, and trying every possible way to figure out what I was looking at. I remember one time having my kitchen table completely covered with mushrooms, separated into 23 different species. I never knew enough to actually prepare and eat them, which is fine, because I always knew that if I made a mistake, it was not going to go well. But I loved looking at them, watching them, photographing them, and trying to understand why they grew exactly where they did.
Now that I live in Florida, they start popping up everywhere during the rainy season, usually around May or June. In some places I will see fairy rings, big circles that grow a little larger every year, sometimes 20 or 30 feet across. They make the coolest photos. I especially love all the colors, shapes, spores, patterns, and different types of mushrooms.
I have also heard many times about magic mushrooms, and in Mexico around 2025 I was way up in the mountains where they grow wild and are collected and used by locals for ceremonial purposes. Mostly, though, what amazes me is the huge variety of life forms on Earth and how every possible opportunity or niche seems to be occupied by something. These organisms are continuously evolving to take advantage of whatever new conditions they find.
With the climate changing and temperatures gradually — or possibly rapidly — becoming warmer, many species will have to evolve, move, adapt, or disappear. I am fascinated by watching how life responds to change, and I hope humans can find a way to keep adapting too.
Photos from the Two Older Pages
All of the photo paths below are written for this new page to live as lichen.html in the main public HTML directory. Each photo is clickable to its full-size version.
