Three days ago I photographed the statue of Jimi Hendrix on Capital Hill, some pretty flowers at tne local QFC, then came across a patch of nice sun drying and fresh lbms and a small area in the same patch of Psilpcybe stuntzii (blue Ringers). Afew hours later i photographed some magic cacti on an outdoor stal in form t of a florist shoo in the U district
I will, over the weekend, pot those other tales.
As usual, I never look directly for shrooms these days and when I am not out looking for them, I usually find some.
Especially magic ones.
So here I was just minding my own business and then I looked farther down the patch of grassy area and saw some shrooms which from where I was standing were smaller and thin, but visible to the eye although they were hiding in the shadowy length of the grass and from my viewpoint were definitely different than the ones I had just photographed.
While these were not really in a clear area to fully photograph them in situ without the natural background of all the grass, and since I had no scissors with me to cut away some of the grass as I usually do in order to photograph a clear image of the whole mushroom, I then decided to picked up a few specimens and hold them in my hand to photograph certain macroscopic features to be used in identifying them as i sometimes to with blue ringers, cubes, baeos, cyans and other cool looking shrooms, although these were okay specimens.
This was a good find and I was able to macroscopically examine them to confirm my suspicions as to what species I thought they were, instantly checked hem out and came up with a swift positive id of the species.
They were Psilocybe stuntzii Guzmán (blue ringers).
Since I have a few thousand photo images in my library of blue ringers, I only took a few photos of these fresh shrooms as they were really not in the best of conditions to keep in my digital files.
So here are three photos of this magic shroom:
This one in my hand show certain macroscopic characteristic features common in Psilocybes,. Striate margin (the lines of the gills showing through the cap;The hygrophanous color change from a chocolate-olive brown to a straw-yellow color in drying, and the bluing of the ring when it separates from the cap and stem which brings about an oxidation confirming the presence of psilocine inthe mushroom where it was damaged by natural causes.
Blue ringer 1:
Hand held to check for conformati of identity of the species and genera.
http://mycotopia.net...=1&d=1209743030
Blue Ringer 2:
A slightly blurred image of some ringers.
http://mycotopia.net...=1&d=1209743030
and
Image 3:
The ring or veil remnant on this P. stuntzii (blue ringer) displays a nice bluing in the remnants of the remaining portion of the veil.
http://mycotopia.net...=1&d=1209743030
The ones in my hand were more fresher and still had some water content from the morning drizzly rain spurts and as you can see, two specimens had striate margins visible to the eye while the third was older and the hygrophanous color change to straw yellow, normal in many generas of shroom families, had also been used as an indicator these were Psilocybe species. Because the changing color as seen in the image with three mushrooms, the striate margin and the blue ringer are good identification feature points used to determine the species I was photographing.
mjshroomer
