Foxfire: A Surreal Experience!

I CAN'T BELIEVE I FORGOT TO POST ABOUT THIS!

I was on a night-time run with my dog on the backroads near my house in early August of 2010 and saw an eerie, greyish-bluish-green glow coming from a spot about 50 yards into the woods. Knowing that area to be too densely wooded and too sloped for camping I was a little weirded out but figured that someone had drunkenly wandered into the woods and maybe passed out with a flashlight or cellphone turned on and I was concerned (people stop on that road frequently to drink or dump trash unfortunately). My dog usually reacts to the presence of another creature or person and he did not even register any sort of acknowledgement of whatever was causing the light. I called toward the light to see if anyone was there, the woods remained stone-silent. At this point the every hair on my body began to stand on end and my pulse started racing. This scared me a lot, having never encountered it before, but my curiousity was just a little bit stronger than my fear. I turned on my flashlight and with a death-grip on my dog's collar started slowly walking into the woods. When I got to the area where I figured the light had been coming from I saw nothing at all, not even a hint of a glow. With my brain and heart both amped up from the fear I did not know what to think. I really didn't want to but figured the best way to get another glimpse of the glow was to douse the flashlight. Upon covering the flashlight with my hand I was both stunned and amazed by what sat directly six feet in front of me: my first ever bioluminescent fungus discovery. I had no idea that this sort of thing occurred in environments other than tropical & temperate zones. Having studied and marveled at it for a few minutes I then ran home as fast as my legs could carry me to grab my camera.

Upon further study I determined that the species of the fungus is probably the immature form of Panellus Stipticus just barely starting to culture in the moist, freshly exposed wood of this fallen birch tree, having not formed true caps yet. It is also one of the species often referred to colloquially as 'Foxfire' but I have yet to confirm this.

Following is a progression of pictures alternating normal flash exposures with the same shots taken in the dark. The only thing different from the pictures was that the glow was more of a pale bluish green and it saturated the wood more thoroughly than in the pictures, the camera apparently only picked up the green spectrum. These are all 15-second exposures with a 2.4 aperture setting, 1600 ISO.

The other amazing thing about this is the very narrow margin of conditions which it requires to actually glow. Temperatures need to be about in the high-30s - high 40s with the humidity, type of wood, level of degradation of the wood as well as the time of year being just right. I feel very fortunate to have seen this.

Two New Inductions...

into the Sacred Sisterhood of Sacrosanct Cisterns. Don't ask me why I am apparently obsessed with them, I don't even know but have been neglecting to mention new memberships, found these two on another hike in the foothills a few months ago. I spoke to the farmer who maintains the land for the land-owner (also the person who built the enclosure for this one as I found out) and he is hoping to convince the land-owner to have enclosures built for all of the cisterns on the land. I'm not sure how I feel about enclosing all of them. I guess I understand if the intention is to use them all again some day or prevent falling/drowning hazards. Still, they are kind of pretty and almost naturalized to their surroundings when in a state of disrepair.


This one is about 3' X 6'. A few scant remains of it's former enclosure lie around it. It lays hidden in the woods about a hundred yards up the hill from a couple of the others mentioned previously.

This is the biggest one I've ever seen, roughly 5' X 9' and at least eight feet deep. I noticed that several unfortunate critters had fallen into it and drowned so, being careful not to touch them. I fished them out with a tree branch and buried them. Stuck a couple branches in at odd angles so that future clumsy critters would be able to climb back out. I also brought a few of my pond goldfish up on a subsequent hike and put them in there to help control mosquitos.

While I was busy mucking around with the big cistern, my dog disappeared for a few minutes and came back soaked from head to toe. I was curious where he found water deep enough to swim so I followed his tracks backwards to this beautiful woodland bog-pond just up the hill from the cistern. The place is very serene and unspoiled, I think it will be one of my favorite new places to take friends when we are out hiking or on a picnic.

"Maidenhair" Fern grows abundantly in biotopes like this: filtered sunlight, lots of sphagnum moss & still, acidic water with a very thick layer of settled organic matter just below the surface. This is one of those places where if you tread on the mossy areas, the entire ground ripples and one must be careful not to damage the plant life or fall through the moss layer.

Insane Lumberjack & His Faithful Sidekick

One of the great gifts my parents gave me for Christmas was a special type of log-splitting axe called a Chopper One. I gotta say, it works magnificently... splitting log chunks in one stroke which would typically take a half dozen strokes with a sledgehammer & wedge. I also happened to have brought my chainsaw with me to cut up some tree limbs which had fallen in my parents' yard due to the recent ice storm. My parents are always getting gag gifts to go with the practical ones so they bought me a plaid flannel shirt and faux-fur-lined woodsman's hat to complete the ensemble.

Both pictures courtesy of my father.

I bet he could tow at least a small sleigh.

Like Damp Earth, Leaf Litter, and Moss...

...was the smell of the woods on my hike yesterday. I forgot what springtime in the woods smelled like and realized how much I missed it. Yet again I caught myself slogging muddy trails after dark, but I don't mind. Again also I will mention that I find it strange that the woods in the night-time was one of my biggest fears well into my teenage years, now it happens to be my biggest source of zen moments and spiritual/mental/emotional epiphanies. I am noticing more and more that life in general and mine in particular is filled with odd paradoxes and like a newly learned word... the moment you grasp it and integrate it into your vocabulary, suddenly it is popping up everywhere, causing you to take note of it; 'prescient' being one of them, and seemingly apropos given some recent life circumstances which I won't expound upon right now.

A lovely quote spotted on a placard in the meetinghouse library today:
"Faith is the bird that feels the light and sings when the dawn is still dark." -Rabindranath Tagore
It gave me some food for thought, even more so than much of the reading I've been doing lately.

I finally got a laptop computer, purchased for $200 plus some mind-numbing computer work for a couple of friends. The model I worked on was a Dell Inspiron 1500 which turned out to have some device driver issues, a couple of viruses, and a bazillion spyware programs on it. The model I received for this bargain price was an Inspiron 1100. Definitely not top of the line, but more than sufficient for my purposes. I also needed to do a bit of work on this one being as it was infected with one of those malicious RIAA rootkits as well as more viruses and spyware. Both machines are now in excellent working order.

Oh yeah, and I know this post is totally going A.D.D. on you, so I should just run with it now... a few random pictures I found lying around on the computer (I can't remember whether or not some of these have been posted here before):

Me (around age 20 or 21?) and 'Little Buster Brown', a baby robin that my sister's dog brought in unharmed after finding it outdoors. He was an awkward-looking little pink blob with quills when I first took him home and brought him up on a diet of meat-based baby food, worms, and assorted bugs. It was amusing for visitors to see me puttering around in the back yard with him on my shoulder or head. I enjoyed making them think I was some sort of ultra nature boy. Raising this little guy was easy, but the problematic part was letting him go. He just kept coming back no matter how often or how far I took him into the woods. The most amusing scenario was when I thought he was finally gone and he came barreling out of the bushes, landing SPLAT! into a bowl of spaghetti that I was enjoying on my parents' front deck.

A nice silhouetted sunset shot that I took while walking to a friend's house the other evening


'Cromwell', a wild turkey who frequents my parents' back yard


A couple of macro shots of a 'Cherry' shrimp, Neocaridina denticulata sinensis, in one of the planted displays at my workplace

Back when I had long hair, not sure what got into my head back then (I drank a lot back then, so possibly too much Captain Morgan???) ;-p

Glamour shot