Menegazzia Terebrata, Tree Flute

Day 82: Oh, let's start the New Year off right with finding a "life list" lichen on January 1! We weren't ten feet away from the actual trailhead at Grass Lake before I checked up short to investigate the bark of a young alder. Yonit understood...you can't take Crow into the woods with any expectation of going directly from Point A to Point B...and she was very patient as I checked multiple specimens of an unknown lichen for characteristics I could use in making an identification. The object of my curiosity looked superficially like a Hypogymnia, but several macroscopic features spoke against that genus. First of all, it was growing in neat rosettes. Hypogymniae tend to sprawl. Secondly, although the lobes were puffy like a Hypogymnia, the upper surface was perforated, almost every lobe having at least one small hole in evidence. Muttering to myself, "Nope, not Hypogymnia...no, not Parmeliopsis...this one's going to take some diggin'..." I rejoined Yonit and we continued down the trail after I'd taken photos. Fully expecting it to either present multiple options for an ID or to defeat me entirely, I settled in first with McCune's "Macrolichens of the Pacific Northwest" and turned almost immediately to the correct page. OMG! The perforations defined it as Menegazzia, going on to explain that those holes made the genus easy to identify, even for novices. Further delving into the books to find its range narrowed the options to M. terebrata, otherwise known as "Treeflute" or "Hole-punch Lichen." A similar species (M. subsimilis) grows in a narrow band along the Washington coast. Wikipedia says that the genus was described by Veronese Abramo Massalongo in 1854. He named it for his friend, naturalist Luigi Menegazzi. "Menegazzia!" What a marvelous word! And that said, something which is "terebrate" (the second half of the binomial) exhibits punch-like holes or bore holes...you know, like a flute. I can almost imagine faerie chamber music drifting through the woods at Grass Lake on a warm summer night. Mozart on a lichen flute! I'll hear it in my dreams: breathy, delicate, and the frogs will dance.