🍄Ipsissimus🍁Mocata🍄
A doomed forest hermit with too many cats. Original photos of NorCal natural history with an emphasis on mycology & native botany, but occasionally posting stuff about heavy music and weirdo cinema. ☭
linktr.ee/mocata
- It isn’t quite time yet for Aesculus californica to be leafing out, but I do love seeing its silvery branches in the winter when they’re doing their best to look like an indecipherable metal logo. 🌱📷📸
- A 10-minute monster performance of Fläsket Brinner playing (when Bo Hansson still in the band!) at the Stockholms Konserthus back when they were supporting the Mothers of Invention in late 1970. Krautrock-levels of hypnotic repetition building to fiery intensity! m.youtube.com/watch?v=vSL0...
- Fav fungal finds of 2025, vol. 6: Hericium erinaceus. A real treat to see this one show up growing right in my own yard again, just in time for a holiday feast! 🍄📷📸
- “Just a few” snow geese taking off after a bald eagle made a low pass over the flooded fields down in the Central Valley.
- Fav fungal finds of 2025, vol. 5: Gymnopilus ventricosus. A related east-coast species, G. subspectabilis (the so-called “Big Laughing Gym”), is psychoactive, but this west-coast counterpart apparently is not. It is, however, supposed to be a great mushroom for making a gold-colored fabric dye.
- Fav fungi of 2025, Vol. 4: Collybia nuda. It’s not in Clitocybe anymore, but with that vibrant purple and a distinctive scent which somehow smells EXACTLY like opening up a can of Minute Maid frozen orange juice concentrate, there’s no mistaking it for anything but a blewit. Quite tasty, too! 🍄📷📸
- The unexpected best cover song of 2025. m.youtube.com/watch?v=N5Jo...
- Another from the 2025 fungal retrospective: Clavaria fragilis, a ghostly white little saprobe with the charming colloquial name of “fairy fingers”. 🍄📷📸
- All of this rain certainly has Deer Creek looking rather vigorous.
- Next up in the look back at this season’s favorites: good ol’ Stropharia ambigua. Between their color, form, size, and sheer numbers, these never disappoint. 🍄📷📸
- My low-effort resolution this year was to start posting over here again, so… I’m back! Apologies to anyone who follows me elsewhere for the re-runs, but I figured I’d share a few of my favorite mushrooms I’ve encountered over my absence. Kicking things off: Amanita calyptroderma! 🍄📷📸
- As of yesterday, I have officially reached the “Breaking Down” stage of the Snag Cycle. Yay for 40, I guess?
- Pollinator time out in the garden. I know it’s a rare thing for me to be posting something cultivated, but with a bloom like that, I couldn’t resist. 🌱🪲📷📸
- Paeonia brownii. These native peonies have such striking flowers, yet they can be easy to miss while walking down a trail, as the flowers face downward, showing only hints of burgundy petals from the side. If you you flip them over like this, however, they are quite a sight to behold! 🌱📷📸
- A fungal flashback from earlier in the year: Verpa conica, a not-quite-a-morel in Morchellaceae. Quit giggling at the back of the class — it looks like a daikon radish wearing a cloche and *certainly* not like anything else. 🍄📷📸
- Aphyllon franciscanum. I’ve been wanting to see these golden weirdos for a while now and I lucked out and found multiple clusters in the same ultramafic hillside where I saw the Brodiaea sierrae, as they’ve also adapted to handle the harsh, nutrient-poor conditions of serpentine soil. 🌱📷📸
- Been enjoying the debut release by The New Eves quite a bit. A blend of post-punk and English folk revival that reminds me at times of ‘Furia’ by The Fates, the short-lived group started by Una Baines of The Fall. Bonus points for the descending “Holiday in Cambodia”-inspired riff on this track: 🎧
- Rhododendron occidentale. A ubiquitous shrub of Pacific forests, it may not have the giant blooms of its cultivated cousins, but it more than makes up for it by having one of the most divine scents you’ll ever encounter in the woods. You’ll smell it before you even see it yards down the trail! 🌱📷📸
- Happy International Cat Day from this ridiculous beast.
- Someone found a sunbeam. 📷📸😺
- Okay, last pic of Brodiaea sierrae, I swear! This time, however, it’s my attempt to immortalize it through my rusty and questionable ink & watercolor skills. Remind me next time to not to wait until the last day to try to make something like this for a gift, especially when I’m so out of practice.
- Brodiaea sierrae again, but with a little something extra—a mystery gall on its stem. From what I’ve read, this is formed by an undescribed species (!) of midge in the genus Lasioptera that seems to have a preference for Brodiaeoideae. 📷📸🌱🪲
- Brodiaea sierrae, a rare plant with limited distribution which occurs only in four counties in northern California and nowhere else in the world. Formerly considered B. californica, but it turns out that it’s not only a different species, but actually more closely related to B. leptandra. 📷📸🌱
- Asarum hartwegii. What a fuzzy weirdo! (Yes, I know... “turn on your monitor”) Here in California, Aristolochiaceae only has a few species of Asarum and one equally weird Aristolochia, but there are hundreds more species in the tropics. 📷📸🌱
