Many turtles out there this year soakin up the sun
prob deer mouse.
Pair in our car starting to nest …
Scrubbed car clean,
both mice came out starving while I was doing it,
we tried to live catch them to release them but our live catch trap is missing a piece and the mice are too quick for us to try to use our hands at all.
So sadly, now we put out kill traps, today,
bc they’ve already chewed through a car wire for the white puffy stuffing inside, and I can’t have them do more damage.
This car a year ago, they cut the wires and it’s an electric car so it wouldn’t start and had to be towed and thousands in damage to fix (though also had a tree smash the top of car, so don’t know how much of the $10,000 bill went to the mouse damage vs. tree damage … )
I know the lighting is a little bit bad but it was brown and not gray I can't remember which gender that was.
Solitary. Bent over into the moss in mixed conifer forest.
Update and more info:
The fruiting body was about 10 cm tall – probably 15 when unfolded. It had an indistinct, mild, faint scent.
Flesh white - solid, but not dense. Stringy. No reaction to KOH.
Basidia present. I was able to get a spore print on the second try after the mushroom had dried out a bit. The spores were formed on the upper surface of the fruiting body, mostly where it folded over. I didn’t see anything that I recognized as a distinct hymenial surface on the mushroom. The spore print showed no gill-like pattern.
The spores were white, elliptical to ovoid, with a single oil droplet, a pitted or bumpy surface, and a projection (sterigmata?) on the narrow end. They measured approximately 10.0 microns (9.09-10.39, N=10) by 6.4 microns (5.69-6.85, N=10).
Clavariadelphus truncatus or borealis? Borealis is described as having white spores. iNaturalist says borealis is obsolete.
Descriptions of both species say they have smooth spores. I don't think these spores are smooth, but maybe I'm misinterpreting the spore images?