Although it had rained overnight it was still very dry on Saturday afternoon. Without much hope I went out for a bit of a potter around my local patch and was surprised by how many fungi I managed to find. Because they were so desiccated they were hard to work with - spores were thin on the ground. For this one though I was able to get a spore print, which annoyed me by being ochre-colured (I assumed this was a Mycena but then the spore print would have been white). This posed a bit of a problem, but after some digging this was clearly a Galerina - but which one? From macroscopic features I managed to get it down to three possible species, from where the key difference was spore morphology, in particular dimensions. Fortunately, I had done my microscopy diligently, carefully noting down all the measurements and taking photographs. When I got back to my detective work on Tuesday night (Mycology Holmes, Sherlock's younger brother) ... I discovered that I had thrown away the piece of paper with all the measurements written on it. Which wouldn't have been a problem ... if Tuesday had not been dustbin day. We famous detectives are noted for being stubborn (reference: any popular TV series), and I eventually managed to reconstruct the missing piece of paper by generating a scale bar from photos of the stage micrometer. This was something I have been meaning to do for a while, but it took The Great Piece Of Paper Disaster of '17 to make me get my lazy ass into gear. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you (with 98.7% confidence) The Dwarf Bell, Galerina pumila.
Sony ILCE-6000
E PZ 16-50mm F3.5-5.6 OSS
f6.3 50mm 1.3s ISO 100
