Things I Picked Up Over the Years

Here's a few random things I've picked up over the years.

This was a cold gold crowned kinglet I found in downtown Chicago. Eventually it warmed up in my hand and was able to fly away.

I wish these things were edible. I find quite a few of these hedge apple trees around here and they have such interesting fruit. There's a way you can dry these so they become decorative and you can paint them interesting colors to leave around the house.

Every spring the wild chives grow in abundance here and I usually go foraging for them. I like to put them in sour dough crepes.

One of the few black trumpets I've ever found. I found this one way up in Michigan and I wish I could find a stash of them growing lower here in Chicago. They dry really well for storage and have an amazing taste.

Here is a little Christmas Cholla cactus pear. They are sweet and super tart at the same time. You can take a lighter to them to burn off the tiny little hairy thorns before eating them.

The brown snakes seem to show up around fall around here. I usually end up catching one per year, mostly because I'm able to hear them crinkling around in the dry leaves.

A tiny little millipede. These guys used to invade my ground floor apartment and I would be cleaning up their dried up carcasses every week.

Here is a baby night snake in Arizona. These guys are great for keeping down the rodent population, the only problem is they tend to act like rattle snakes and at this age you could possibly be picking up a tiny rattlesnake that hasn't grown in its rattles yet. I could ID it because of its back pattern.

A poor cold honeybee after a rain storm.

I found these acorn caps while looking for morel mushrooms. The pattern sort of reminded me of a morel but it turned out to be a disappointing acorn cap instead.

Speaking of acorns, look at these tiny little mushrooms surrounding the cap edge. These little guys are Hymenoscyphus fructigenus one of the smallest mushrooms I've ever found.

Here's a bit of dryad's saddle I picked off a large specimen. Usually you can only eat the outer edge of these as the inner edge is too spongy. If it breaks off like this it is still fresh enough to eat. If it just bends like a sponge then good luck trying to eat it.

And now for a huge centipede that I would never try and catch in my hand lol. Each leg has poison and it would leave a horrible centipede shaped rash on your hand if you picked it up.

That's all for now, thanks for looking :-)