The wife, aka Garden Girl, was out cutting the foilage for fall fun today when she made this "EEEWWWW!" sound. She called me over and pointed to this...this...thing growing out of the mulch. As I wandered over toward the growth, she sputtered out that it--whatever IT was--looked like a dog's....a male dog's....well, you know, it's......for god sake, just look at the photo and you figure it out. (I couldn't believe she said this out loud, but darn it if she wasn't correct.)
(Photo from David Barker, god love him.)
So, I get over to where the growths are growing and think, boy these are some REALLY ugly weird things popping out of the garden. Neither of us has ever seen ANYTHING like this in the gardens, and we've seen a lot of weird things in our time. This was a befuckling garden moment, if I might say so.
(Here's another photo, this one from Pam Kaminski. Why people are taking photos of these ugly things, I have no idea, but I'm glad they did so you, too can see what we are looking at...)
I cut one open with the loppy-cutty garden tool-thingy, but nothing really happened except it mushed apart and was really rather gross. The wife was torn between wanting to get a closer look and running quickly to the nearest bathroom.
Of course, being the nerds that we are, we had to find out what we were the proud "parents" of in the garden. The wife ran directly to the source of all information--the Internet--and entered "fungus identification" for the Google Search. (She was putting her money on the fungus route.) She was right--before we could say "dog pee pee," we were looking at photos of the very things springing out of our lawn. Now, I KNOW you, too want to check out the action, click on: www.mushroomexpert.com/mutinus_elegans.html
Yes, this is how we spend our free time.
I think the wife felt much better once she knew there wasn't something dangerous growing near the house. She'll have to decide whether or not she has the oomph to remove those puppies (pun intended). The name of this fungus is Mutinus caninus, otherwise known as some type of Stinkhorn, and as you can see, is actually named after canine because......well, you figure it out...
The other nature-relatish thing from this weekend was a dead bird photo op. Master Reiki and Blue Eyes had this bird SPLAT into one of their windows at the new house--the poor feathered friend plopped right on the front stair, never to fly again. It was a beautiful bird--about seven inches long, white belly, long pointy, scary beak. I like to think I'm an amateur birder (from my days with the ex-hubby--we used to go bird watching on dates, believe it or not), but I was not familiar with this bird (I'm telling ya, I've seen lots of birds...where the hell is the ex-husband when I need him?). This was no yellowed bellied flicker or rose breasted grossbeak. I get giddy when I see an American Oriole and I am reminded of Petite Lake when I hear the call of a Blue Jay....but, this was neither. This dead bird left me stymied. It looked like this (only dead):
We returned to our house and dug out our bird book. At first, I guessed it was a Eastern Kingbird, only the dead bird has a much longer and scarier beak than the "Birds of Illinois Field Guide" kingbird photo. The wife's first vote was a flycatcher, but I poo pooed that right away. I thought about calling it the "white-breasted nuthatch," but it seemed too big to be that and a nuthatch's tail is shorter than the dead bird's tail was.....the only thing we could do is take pictures of the thing. So, we stood in the brush and took photos of the dead bird. I got some great close-ups. We then went home and compared the photos of the dead bird to photos of birds on the Internet. (We are SO NERDY. Who sits around looking at bird photos on the Net on the weekend?) Thankfully, I found that the photos of the nuthatch on the internet looked like 
the dead bird, but like I said, alive. We were able to go to bed knowing that we had identified two incredibly wonderful things about nature this weekend. Here's to Stinkworm!
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