As long as I keep finding these things, I might as well keep mentioning them. The odd thing, to me, is that I'm repeatedly finding new and different mushrooms, all while walking the same streets of town. For example, I'd walked past the place I found this one at least ten times in the past week or so:
Today, I just happened to notice a few buttons, because they looked too smooth and, well, fuzzy about the edges to be stones. I had to actually get down on my knees and touch them to be sure they weren't just a few errant bits of smooth gravel kicked out of someone's garden.
Turns out they're something in the Hebeloma genus, though I can't say for sure which it is. H. crustuliniforme, maybe, but as it's poisonous, I'm comfy enough with just a genus identification. The tip-offs - after examining the spore print and various physical features - were the little beads of liquid scattered about the gills and the definite odor of radishes. Apparently they taste like radishes, too.
The real find, though, was this little patch of fungi:
And when I say little, I mean it. The biggest of them was maybe 3/8 inch across; they were so tiny that I had a hell of a time getting a steady picture with the macro lens, even on a sunny day. I even had a hard time finding them again when I went back with the camera.
They're Crucibulum laeve, more commonly known as the bird's nest fungus. The "nest" is a peridium, a sort of "splash cup" for dispersing the "eggs", which are little sacs filled with spores. Even though these are so tiny, they've evolved so that a raindrop falling into the peridium will cause the peridioles to be flung up to several feet away.
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