Inwood Hill Park on January 2nd, fungi, snails & slugs, moss

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Thanks to the New York Mycological Society, there was an outing to Inwood Hill Park yesterday. My old friend Caterina Verde (whom I first met 40 years ago when we were both living in a loft building on Leonard Street in Tribeca) picked me up on my block and drove me up to Inwood Hill. We spent about 3 hours there until our energy ran out. It was my first visit to that park, so I was totally psyched.

The weather was very warm and dampish, in the low 50s, as it has been now for several weeks, and therefore it was very good weather for fungi. I also asked the NYMS members if they would please look out for snails and slugs, because, in the process of searching for fungi, I knew they would be turning over dead wood, and therefore they would be very likely to find terrestrial gastropods.

As per usual for me, I found several fungi that are plant pathogens. Of course all of us found a lot of "regular" fungi. It turned out that many of the species of regular fungi I found were species that I had seen before elsewhere (Randalls Island and Central Park), but nevertheless, several species I observed were entirely new to me:

Cramp Balls
Warlocks Butter
Witches Butter
Crimped Gill
Auricularia angiospermarum
Little Nest Polypore

I also found an attractive and new-to-me species of moss. This moss was very distinctive-looking, which was a pleasant surprise, as so many mosses are impossible for a beginner to ID:

Common Pocket-Moss, Fissidens taxifolius

As for the mollusks, altogether we found one land-snail species and four land-slug species, thanks to so much generous help in searching by so many of the NYMS members:

Discus rotundatus, the Round Snail
Agriolimax reticulatus, the Milky Slug
Limax maximus, the Leopard Slug -- the first time I have encountered live specimens of that species in NYC
Arion hortensis, the Garden Arion -- orange sole
Hortensis-group Arion Slugs -- juveniles, but the foot mucus was colorless
Mesarion sp. -- the first time I have found Mesarion in the US

And one person found a cluster of gastropod eggs inside a decaying log. The eggs were somewhat large, so I suspect they were from Limax maximus.

All in all I had a wonderful time. It was really great to spend all that time with Caterina and the NYMS folks, and wonderful to visit Inwood Hill Park for the first time.
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