Falling Back & Mushroom Hunting

This early morning we officially "fell-back" an hour and now it suddenly feels like Winter to me. Dusk came right around 5:00 tonight and it immediately felt like 8 PM . I have such a hard time being productive after dark . I am too much like chicken I guess and derive so much of my energy from the sun. Fortunately, today's weather included some sunny breaks between the downpours of rain. Since this last week had been so warm and mild, I decided it would be a good time to walk the property and look for mushrooms. Sure enough, I had lots of interesting mushroom to search out and find. I do not know my native mushrooms by name, so I just enjoyed their amazing diversity of size, form, and color.

This bunch was down in my big garden and was growing under some fir trees. They were really pretty shades of browns and and on the older mushrooms the dome was turned inside out exposing the gills.

This one was also down under the fir trees. It had a neat sunken center ring and had fairly flat dome.

 This one had such a small, delicate stem which was holding up a thin, flat top.

I love this mushroom. The orange dome caught my eye as I was walking by. Between the thick yellow stalk and the bright orange top, it looks like it was colored by an artist. And something about it just screams "poisonous" to me!

This sweet mushroom wasn't very tall, but it had a wide top that looked like a toad should be sitting on it.

I found this small, white variety all over our property. The white color really stood out against all of the greens and browns.

And isn't this bunch cool. Long stems with very rounded domes. I wonder how many other varieties I missed seeing today on my walk. If you can identify any of the above pictures, please let me know!