Day 18.232: Saturday morning nature

Here are some of the things that caught our eye yesterday morning (apart from the birds).

Firstly, at the beach:

The sand was mostly covered with a deep band of seaweed - the results of the turmoil of Hurricane Erin's passing-by out in the Gulf of Maine last week

Some of it was coastal weed, but there were several kinds of kelp from much deeper waters

Someone spotted this sponge nestled in the weed

And then, as we returned through the new Fletcher's Neck Sanctuary:

This is called common sunburst lichen

Do you see the pea pods in this photo? We didn't notice them until we found out that the plant is partridge pea and then we realized how many there were.

This fungus reminded me of shaggy inkcap but I remembered that that is usually peaking nearer the end of October than the end of August. This was our best sighting of those ones.
This one is hare's foot inkcap.

We were able to see it in various stages of its development

Here are some after they've done their inky dissolving trick - a process I learned today is called deliquescence