Fungi to consider
Bracket fungi
In the ongoing admissions of things I don't know well, here's yet another collection of organisms that fit the theme. I'm not as woefully ignorant about fungi as I am about mosses and lichens, but I'm not a wizard on mushrooms, either. These are some kind of bracket fungi, and they're happily reducing a birch branch to its component molecules. Alas, I was more interested in capturing the picture than in making a proper acquaintance, so I didn't even turn the branch over and determine whether the mushrooms had gills or pores. That, at least, would have enabled me to start the ID process. But I was in too much of a hurry, so we'll just have to wait until I go back to Babcock and do the right thing, in terms of natural history.