Mysterious tiny mushrooms
What with the drought and all, it's been a pretty meager mushroom season. I've found very few edibles—actually, so far, none that I'm sure of—and very few of the familiar characters either. But as I was stacking wood this afternoon, I turned over a few of the older chunks that had been in place in the ground for months and I discovered that they'd been making their own subterranean humidity which at least one species of fungus had taken advantage of. These mystery mushrooms are positively lilliputian—barely an inch long, at most. As is too often the case, I don't know which species, even genus, they belong to, save that I think they may hold a membership in the Mycena clan, a group that includes many miniature mushrooms. Named or nameless, they're pretty little things, with perfect caps that, so far, have never opened. Whatever they are, they're food both for the eyes and the macro lens, or, in Nikonese, the "micro" lens. If I can ever figure out their identity, perhaps I'll be able to determine whether they're food for the stomach: not a meal, to be sure, but maybe a quick appetizer.