Favoritos de aprildmoore

The Fiery Skippers must be having a good migration year. I've never noticed these before, but I saw several on the NKU campus a few days ago, and now I've been seeing them flitting around the "aster" patches in my yard this weekend. It's exciting to record a new skipper for the yard -- I usually just see Peck's and Sachems at this time of year.

• the soralia at the ends of the lobes are not just one entire terminal soralia as one finds in Parmotrema retuculatum, instead the soralia are multiple, discontinuous, and loosely grouped near the end of the lobe, not just capping the lobe
• a few soralia are clearly not at the tip of the lobe, but are on the thallus near or before where the lobe begins

These traits are more emphatic in the observation here - https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/195492778

Serendipity is a curious thing.

On two separate twigs of two different trees, the same two species of lichens grew side-by-side. Happenstance is that I found both twigs within a few minutes time, close enough together that the circumstance of collocation was not lost upon me. So, I present the two twigs together despite it being against usual protocol of observation management.

Submitted for your consideration,
Pertusaria sinusmexicani on the left,
and Ochrolechia africana on the right.

The Winter guise of some dry seed heads, in dense profusion near a little flowing brook at the edge of a meadow full of seeds for resident birds. Wild Basil is a plant I had pretty much overlooked until recently. The green leaves indeed have a pleasant smell and taste earlier in the year, but these in December had lost most of their volatiles and were dry and bland.

This was on a beautiful old former farm amidst the rolling hills of the Allegheny Plateau with its cover of mixed mesophytic deciduous woodland, at an elevation of around 359 meters (1178 feet).