Day 48: Yesterday was the first dry day we've had in a month, so I went out for a short local walk, noting in my pedestrian travels that quite a lot of debris and even some fairly good-sized trees had come down during our parade of blustery weather events. I wasn't thinking about canopy lichens when I stepped over a stick, but my mind registered an observation which filtered to the surface of my consciousness a hundred feet distant: "That looked like Kidneys." I decided not to backtrack, lured forward by the prospect of finding interesting fungi further on. Then, after having completed my circuit of the loop, I thought I might go back to photograph a bracket fungus I'd noted, and by that point, I'd forgotten all about the Kidney stick. I was on my way back to the trailhead when again as I stepped over the stick, my brain insisted that I take a closer look: "Those ARE Kidneys, and you've never seen them here before." Sure enough, the short, broken twig was covered with Nephroma helveticum, its rich mahogany-coloured apothecia rimmed with the creamy "fringe" which supplies its common name, Fringed Kidney Lichen. The light was very dim where the stick had fallen, so I carried it to a bed of step-moss where a log served as my tripod for a long exposure.
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