Fungi!

One of my favorite things to photograph while out fishing or hiking are mushrooms. I was going through some of my old photos and came across these 3. I have since purchased a book off of Amazon.com "Mushrooms of Illinois" so I can better understand the different types.

I am horrible at IDing these things, which is 1 reason I will never take them home for my own consumption. 

Going through this book, each good mushroom seems to have a doppelganger just waiting to trick you, and the outcome is not favorable.

No idea....can anyone else ID these?

This next picture below is my all time personal favorite fungi photo. If I am correct, these are called "Velvet Foot" (Flammulina Velutipes), but what the heck do I know. I'm just a fish bum.

I am almost 100% positive that the fugi below are Oyster Mushrooms. 

(PLEASE correct me if I am wrong with any one of those mushroom IDs.)

Exploring the Northwoods

On a recent trip to the Northwoods of Wisconsin, The Fat Gordo and I took a walk. Instead of wading back to our camp, we decided to take the unbeaten path through the forest. We actually just followed some deer paths.

There was quite a bit of rain that week, so, there was quite a bit of mud. You would have thought it had rained frogs with the amount of frogs we came across while hiking.

We also, came across quite a few different types of mushrooms. I bought and read a book last year so I could better ID the different types of fungi that I would come across, but I did not do a good job of studying it, because, I couldn't ID any of them. Haha

Can you ID it?

A better picture of that bald eagle. It wasn't part of the hike, but who doesn't like looking at this magnificent bird of prey.

One of the things that we were surprised about on our hike, and our trips up here was the lack of wildlife sightings. Yeah, we did see fish, frogs, bald eagles, and few squirrels, but what we thought was missing were the deer, hawks, minks, and beavers. We didn't see any of those. Maybe next year. I'm really hoping to run into some black bears and wolves next year, too....at a safe distance of course. :)

Another shot of The Fat Gordo crossing a mini swamp on a fallen tree.