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The large clumps were over a foot wide and easily visible from the road. They both had shades of orange with creamy colored edges and undersides, but I have seen others that had much more intense shades of orange and deep sulfur yellow.
Sulfur mushrooms do not grow in the typical mushroom fashion we usually picture with a single stalk and an umbrella-like cap. Instead they grow as a group of fleshy lobes or shelves growing over and around each other. Also, instead of emerging from the ground, they usually appear on a stump, log or, as in this case, on a living tree.
The tender edges at the end of each lobe of the sulfur mushroom are edible but are not as tasty to most people as some of the other edible fungi, such as the morels. As the alternative name implies though, they do indeed taste a lot like chicken.
Just make sure that you really have the right kind if you try it. Because of its unique colors for a shelf mushroom, though, it is usually considered a safe bet for most people, especially once you have identified it with certainty by checking with an expert or cross-referencing several sources.
One trick used by the experts is to do a spore print. The cap or lobe of the mushroom is placed with the gills or pores facing down on a sheet of paper. The color of the spores that fall on the paper are another clue to the identity of the mushroom. Many good references list the color of the spore print with the description of the fungus. The sulfur mushroom spores are appropriately yellow to cream color.
Fruit flies
In spite of their chickeny flavor, the mushrooms I saw last week were attracting a very common little critter that I am sure you have all seen at one time or another — the fruit fly. Yes, I mean Drosophila, the tiny red-eyed insect that swarms over fruit that is left in the open during the summer.
It also is the favorite of genetics labs across the world since they reproduce so quickly that variations and mutations can be followed and studied with comparative ease. Females lay up to 500 eggs at a time and the larvae will change into reproducing adults in as little as a week.
They can appear in our homes almost any time of the year but are naturally most abundant during late summer and fall when fruits and vegetables ripen and spoil. It is the rotting and fermenting of fruits that attract the little flies, but I was surprised to see so many of them attracted to a healthy sulfur mushroom.
The mushroom was still growing, but perhaps the fungal smell and bright colors were somehow attractive to the fruit-loving flies. We can get them in our homes inadvertently when bringing food home from the grocery store or by simply getting native flies from outside our homes. Once they get inside, we have to eliminate any spoiling fruit or vegetables, including in garbage disposal units and refuse areas.
They can cause contamination of foods as they crawl about, but otherwise they are harmless. They don’t bite or sting. In fact, they are also a popular item in the pet industry as live food for small animals and fish. But to be honest, I guess if I’m going to see them up close I’d prefer it to be outside on, say … a sulfur mushroom!
Lotus blooming
Later in the week, I traveled farther down the river to see if the lotus were blossoming. I headed for Black Hawk Island south of Genoa on the Wisconsin side of the Mississippi, but first I stopped to visit at the Genoa National Fish Hatchery. The lotus plants were in full bloom in one of their big ponds, but, ironically, they were not blossoming yet at Black Hawk Island.
The flowers are large with several light yellowish petals. The center structure looks like a showerhead and will remain after the flower is pollinated to become a cone-shaped seedpod. The seeds later become a source of food for waterfowl and the rhizomes become winter food for muskrats and beavers. Native Americans once used the same parts as a food source.
The leaves are round and attached to the stalk in the center. They often float flat on the surface, but if the water level drops, the leaves might be held in an inverted umbrella fashion well over the water.
The lily pads of the white pond lily which have been blooming for some time now are attached off center and have a slit on one side of the leaf.
Cattails
A trip to almost any shallow wetland or ditch will reveal numerous common cattails. Aside from being the quintessential symbol of the marsh, the brown structures that get our attention are the seed bearing part of the plant. The thin withered dark part above the brown seedhead is the remains of the male part of the flower. Those cylindrical cattails contain thousands of tiny seeds that will eventually be spread in the wind by the fluffy fibers attached to them.
As with the lotus, many parts of the cattail are edible to both people and animals living in the wetlands.
Whaditiz
It is the seed head of the cattail.
Contact Jim Solberg at (608) 782-2560 or nitefrogger@charter.net.
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