A Foray in New Hampshire
I was going to head to a state park along the Massachusetts/New Hampshire border this morning, but I missed a turn and instead ended up at Silver Lake State Park near Hollis, NH. I met the fellow in charge of the place to make sure it would be alright to collect specimens there, and not only was he fine with my doing it, he let me in without paying for admission. I was only there for a couple of hours before a thunderstorm blew in and I had to cut my time short, but in that small space of time I found a number of nice fungi. Some were familiar to me from Florida and California, and a few were new ones. I'll have pictures later once I get through identifying everything.
I also found some forked fungus beetles in a very large Ganoderma applanatum. As I expected, these northern range specimens were cocoa brown in color like the specimens sent to me from Pennsylvania during my study, not black like the Floridian specimens. Also as predicted, the exits to all of their galleries were in the upper surface of the sporocarps, never through the spore surface itself. I found larvae as well, and all of these were in the context, not the hymenium. All of that is consistent with both Brian Starzomski's observations and my own.
My sleep schedule is a bit off and I guess five years of flat Florida has left me less used to hiking in the sort of hills I found in New Hampshire today than I used to be, so I'm going to crash for a bit. By the time I wake up I should have spore prints from my so-far unidentified specimens. Photos to come thereafter.
