Blogger Bill

I last posted on December 6th, 2009, and here it is, about 7 weeks later, and nary a blog post. You could hardly say that I’ve been suffering from Ennui, but I’m a bit sick of the internet, even though I gravitate to it multiple times a day and spend some hours in here. Not in my blog, but on my web site.

“What web site?”, I hear you ask, and in reply I say here. Notice the pretty image icons at left, as links to my varied webbish endeavours. And note especially the second link, with the bright yellow toadstools, leading to my famous fungi pages. These are the results of my project, from early in 2009, to make sense of the hundreds of pictures of fungi that I’ve photographed in various places from around 2003 onwards. I got involved with a botany group that go out and locate fungi in the forest. We aim to identify them, not eat them - most Australian fungi are not edible, anyway, and they’re too precious to waste in that way. No! We find them, photograph them, perhaps collect representative samples, and document them, in cooperation with the Melbourne Herbarium.

And so later last year I got down and designed display code, wrote it up, and started the onerous task of entering in all of the data I could find on my images. The results can be seen as above, and you can examine my photos in a series of 21 pages of thumbnail images, with multiple pictures of many species of fungi, with my attempt at a concise description of each species, with links to them on the internet.

List of thumbnail pages here - also via the navigation links at the top and bottom of the pages.

List of Latin names of species here. Of course, you need to know what you’re looking for, but the thumbnail pages are suitable for visual inspection of images - there are about 30 images per page.

Finally, over the years I’ve collected hundreds of pertinent links to various web sites to do with fungi, and for the sake of simplicity I’ve catalogued these per world region, and my list of useful fungi links can be seen here, as a separate web page. I’ve had to go into all of those links and weed out any dead links - the ones that no longer work. I’m still collating more of these, as time allows.

But I’m pretty sick of it all at this stage and just want to sit back and see if it’s all of any value to people out there in internet country. I think it will, and I think the web site works well. I’m certainly getting Googled and picked up by other search engines, because I can track that through my web site admin software - that’s one advantage of having my own registered web site.

Anyway, here’s a couple of my better pictures of attractive-looking fungi to finish up with.

The blue one is Mycena interrupta, common name Pixie’s Parasol, and the violet one is Hygrocybe lewellinae, or by the current name Humidicutis lewellinae, common name Mauve Splitting Waxgill.

Most Australian fungi are different from those in Europe and North America, and most don’t have “common names”; also the names get changed as DNA work get’s done on the fungi, so it’s a fluid sort of situation regarding nomenclature.

If you’re interested, you might like to read my concise introductory remarks to the world of fungi. Over to you!

My wife Glenyce and I go on forays for fungi in the bush with a group of knowlegeable enthusiasts from the Field Naturalists Club of Victoria. Last weekend we went via Lady Talbot Drive deep into the forest at “The Beeches”, along an unmade road 15 km NE of Marysville. We were a bit daunted at first, because there was a “Road Closed” sign at the start. Stopping to consult with other members of our group just off the road-side, we heard that other cars had apparently gone ahead of our group, and so eventually up we forged.

We soon saw the reason for the sign, because recent snow and winds had caused damage from fallen trees, and the road was becoming slippery and pot-holed. And at the place for our fungi foray there were still a few small patches of snow.

Slippery forest track and residual snow patches.

Undaunted, rugged up and water-proof, we forged eagerly into the forest gloom. By lunchtime, we’d found a few interesting fungi, but not as many as usual. This forest has 300-year old Myrtle Beeches Nothofagus cunninghamii. Since many fungi are mycorrhizal, being associated with the roots of specific plants, we tend to find a different collection of fungi in different forests.

Inonotus nothofagi top view and pores underneath.

Amongst the interesting fungi of that day was one new to me, Inonotus nothofagi. It grows only on rotting Nothofagus wood as brown brackets, “radially and concentrically grooved with a distinctive pale, crenulate margin” [1] (crenulate: finely toothed with rounded edges). The underneath surface has a greyish-brown irregular labyrinth of open pores.

And so we decided to go back down the weather in convoy owing a bad weather forecast and due to the deteriorating state of the track. It was then that Glenyce discovered that she’d lost her keys! The key-ring had our car key, electronic car lock, front door key and caravan key on it.

We wear waterproof trousers over our slacks, fastened loosely at the ankles. When we put something into our pocket it must first go through the slot in the waterproofs and then safely into the real pocket, the one in our slacks. If we put it merely inside the waterproof’s slot, but not as far as the real pocket, then it falls inside the waterproofs but outside our slacks. From there it might work through the loose gap at the ankle, to fall at random onto the ground! This is what must have happened. We’ve both made this mistake before but caught it at the time!

Her keys could be anywhere inside the forest on or off the tracks. It was a hopeless task to go back and find them, and so we left. At the base of the mountain we all lunched at a charming picnic ground, looked around for more fungi, which we did find. As dusk fell we drove back the 90 km or so to Melbourne.

Later that night, around 3 am, Glenyce woke up, her mind on the keys; she’d gone over all her movements and thought should could remember where she’d last used them. As she recounted it to me over breakfast, we both decided it was worth another round trip of almost 200 km. We would need to buy new keys anyway, and reckoned that if we found them up there, the cost of the petrol would be worth it anyway.

We both enjoy driving and apart from the odd sprinkle or two it was a nice day. She thought they might be on the ground where we’d consulted with the group before forging up the mountain. Searching the gravel and mud closely, we hoped to find them.

But they weren’t there!

I wandered around some more and Glenyce walked off into the deep ferns and shrubs of the open forest. Then I heard a strangled cry of triumph: “I’ve found them!!”

“Fantastic!!”, I yelled back, jubilantly.

Glenyce finding her lost keys in the bush.

She’d had second thoughts, remembering that she’d had a maidenly “bob in the bushes” somewhere in there. She also remembered seeing a couple of interesting fungi near there and had brought one back to show me. It was at that very spot, that the keys had dropped out from the bottom of her waterproof trousers. And so she found them! I rushed into the bush, gave her a great big hug, and told her what a clever girl she was!

Elated, we wandered together around this pretty little spot for a while, looking for nice little fungi, which we always do. It was then that we spied more of those very same ones that she’d seen the day before. Here’s the photo I took:

A nice find, the “Wood Hedgehog”, Hydnum repandum.

Hydnum repandum [2] grows widely in many countries and is relatively common on the ground in Australian forests. The cap and stem are pale peach in colour, and as you can see, underneath there are many delicate, fine, soft teeth. It is from there that the millions of microscopic white spores are continuously released.

Ref: [1] Fuhrer B., A field guide to Australian fungi, Bloomings Books Pty Ltd, Melbourne, 2005, p. 259.
[2] Ditto, p. 242.

In February I went with my wife Glenyce in a caravan to the town of Hall’s Gap, in the depths of the Grampians, a large mountain range located in the Western District of Victoria. Like much of southern Australia it is prone to bushfires, and a major blaze in the area on New Years Day had caused extensive damage.

The hot weather continued, and from Sunday Feb 22rd to Thursday Feb 26th (Australia Day) another fire, caused by lightning, spread widely from the depths of the Grampians across into farms and small towns, destroying much property, stock, and even causing deaths of two people who were overwhelmed by the smoke, crashed the car and were tragically burnt to death near the small town of Moyston. Hall’s Gap itself was under threat, but fortunately was saved by valiant efforts from firefighters and residents.

Now, for some years I have been performing in various jazz bands in the Grampians Jazz Festival. I play the piano, and enjoy playing jazz whenever I can manage it. I had booked my current group, Bill Leithhead’s Jazzmates, into the festival. But we all had to hold our breath after the fires while we waited for the authorities to decide whether the festival could continue. Hundreds of burnt trees had to be made safe for road travel, the electricity and phone had to be reconnected, white posts and reflectors had to be replaced along the roads, and also the town water supply had to be made safe after some contamination indirectly caused by the fires.

At last we got the go-ahead, the news came that the festival was on, and we did the 4-hour drive westwards from Melbourne. We enjoyed the jazz festival, enjoyed listening and playing, and did quite a lot of photography. About 120 bands were there, and an estimated 5000 visitors came along - that includes musicians and their friends, and many visitors from surrounding towns, and from Melbourne. I had not tried to take photos of a jazz festival before, so tried to capture some aspects of it all. The results can be seen in my Photobucket image hosting site as follows:

On Saturday morning a Jazz Parade was enjoyed by everyone.

From Friday Feb 10th to Sunday Feb 12th a total of about 7 different venues were in use by bands, into the small hours of the night. I tried to show what it is like, and my photos of some , but not all of the venues can be seen in my Jazz Activities pictures in Photobucket, split into segments for easier viewing.

After the jazz festival finished, we stayed several more days to unwind and photograph the burnt areas. I had not been close to the aftermath of such extensive bushfires, so decided to try and show what we saw. I actually photographed for the next 4 days, on and off. The various regions affected by the bushfires had their own different characters.

The road south 60km down from Hall’s Gap to Dunkeld had only just been opened, so we spent an afternoon going down there and back. This was the area where the fire had started from a lightning strike, and travelled down SE, driven by a hot NW wind. This was badly burnt, but after only a 2 0r so weeks, there were new signs of life. Split into 3 segments for ease of viewing.

Major damage had also happened when that fire diverged to the east and destroyed a lot of properties and two lives in the Pomonal-Moyston regions. This is where many houses, property and stock were lost. Split into 3 segments for easier viewing.

The earlier fire on New Years Day, called the Deep Lead fire (after a place name), had damaged areas closer towards Stawell, and we toured that region, too. But it was confusing, because the fires had crossed over each 0ther.

And both fires had crisscrossed other areas and made their mark, and so here are some images from the Stawell to Hall’s Gap road.

And so we came home, and I worked on all those photos to show what it was like up at the Grampians after a serious bushfire, but incorporating a joyful, cheerful jazz festival that we hope did its part to lift the spirit of the town of Hall’s Gap and those nearby.

We will certainly be back there, and in spring the wildflower display should be very spectacular, if we have enough rain!!

The Grampians will grow back and bloom again!!