Day 57: When a Park colleague sent me her photos of a strange growth she had discovered on the cut end of a trailside log and said, "Crow, do you have any idea what this is?" I was frankly baffled. I could tell it was fungal, but it was entirely unlike anything I'd ever seen. I misread her instructions or locating it and made two trips on the wrong trail before finally asking her to accompany me to the site, but when we got there, I was no more certain of its nature than I'd been before. The specimens taken by the Park's Plant Ecologist were too dry to examine (she was also baffled), so I took a fresh sample to put under the microscope. When I did so, I found that the thready bits were in fact growing on a gilled structure which I believed to be Angel Wings (Pleurocybella porrigens). The threads were an overgrowth. Armed with that clue (despite it being a very small one), I was eventually able to find information which led to its identification as Tilachlidium brachiatum. My photos of the fungus in situ became the first in the Burke Herbarium's photo gallery. A few days ago, I revisited the site and took this photo. Obviously, "Tilly" has not taken any hurt from cold or damp and is, if anything, doing even better. However, a concerted grid search of a 100-foot radius of her log revealed no other examples of the fungus despite the fact that it is known to occur on a wide variety of shelf-fungus hosts, many of which were present in the area. Tilly is on our 2020 watchlist, for sure.
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