Things I Have Never Seen Before.

When a "Birder" sees a new bird that they have never seen before, they write it on their "Life List." Listing is VERY popular with the Birding crowd. It is not uncommon for a die hard birder to have Day Lists, Location Lists, Life Lists... lists lists lists :) Well, I am not big on writing stuff down - well, I guess, until now. Anyway, Kent and I wanted to take the dogs for a good walk this morning, so we shot up to the White House Greenway. This is a wonderful greenway, not tooooo popular, nice and wide, good bridges, creekside, nicely paved, and VERY importantly, pretty well shaded.

I had not anticipated that I would find any fodder for this blogging enterprise, but expect things when you least expect it. I did see three things that I have never seen before - So, add these to my Life List. LOL!!

We generally carry a phone with us when we walk, just in case there is an emergency, so that is what I had to use to take these pictures - please excuse the poor quality.


I am sure that most of you have seen this before, but for me it was a first... Baby Donkey. He was very cute hanging out with his momma.

Then we saw this VERY weird bug. I will have to check one of my insect field guides for this one. It was easily four inches long and pretty quick moving. The dogs were curious, but I was not likely to let them sniff. It's abdomen looked like it had pincers, as did its' head. Strange to the "n"th degree. Anyone able to keep me from looking this one up? Know what it is?

Then finally, there was this wonderful patch of literally thousands of little mushrooms. They were growing under a huge Tulip Poplar. There was no way to capture the immensity of the patch - it was one of those things that you just have to remember.

More Morels!!

So we kept looking for more of the Black Morels that we had found earlier... Well, this is what we found! LOTS (30+) of "Morchella Semilibra" or Half-Free Morels. Again the common names are kinda funny and I am not sure that they should be shared here... but... hmmmm.... MushroomExpert.com says that they are commonly called "peckerheads" and a couple other questionable names. Whatever you call them, they are DELISH! This evening half of the pound that I picked ended up in a wonderful Wild Mushroom Risotto -- wonderful! Yes, I know that this is not a food blog, but these guys were wildlife. :) Oh, and you may notice that I DID harvest one Black Morel - he's the guy with the bigger black cap in the upper right-hand side of the picture.

Time Marches On

Comparing these pics from those in the earlier post, you can easily see how far the molt has continued. The Goldfinch are wasting NO time in getting ready for their nesting season - though they nest quite a bit later than our other common backyard birds.

I was THRILLED to find 2 Morel Mushrooms in the woods today! If anyone has any hints on either finding more, or encouraging a larger patch to develop, PLEASE let me know. I would really enjoy being able to harvest enough off of our land to be able to make a yummy Morel Sauce for Pasta! Here is a pic of one of the little beauties:

Wikipedia lists: "Dryland Fish", "Merkels", "Molly Moocher" and "Hickory Chickens" as the common names for this fungi. Don't you just LOVE common names!?!