Mycena group, Home

With what little rain we were blessed to receive—only a bit more than half an inch—finally out of the picture, I trekked into the backwoods to see what kinds of mushrooms decided to take advantage of the break in the drought. I easily found a dozen different species that had popped up overnight, but these tiny charmers, each no more than an inch high, were the most eye-catching... and the hardest to ID. One of these days, I need to do some serious mycology study, and try to learn—and re-learn—what I used to know, much of which is sadly completely out of date. So we start at the near beginning at Michael Kuo's wonderful MushroomExpert.com site and determine that these fungi seem to belong to the mycenoid group, which Kuo calls "some of the most beautiful and elegant mushrooms on earth." From there, I arrived at, via comparison to pictures—I'm not quite ready to tackle the ID key—the notion that this is Mycena leaiana, a glorious member of the genus whose cap, "a gorgeous shade of orange," says Kuo, "decomposes the deadwood of hardwoods from the Great Plains eastward."