#Usnea

[michaelnordeman]

Lichens and a moss (on the second picture) in the forests of Värmland, Sweden (January 26, 2018).

[lichenaday]

It’s been so rainy lately and these guys showed up!

Mmmm gorgeous Usnea! Lots of Usnea (Usneas? I'm not sure) are adapted to grow high up in the tree canopy, and going out after some inclement weather has shaken them loose is a good way to find them. Thanks for sharing! And consider posting your find on iNaturalist.

[memoriesofthepark]

Bushy beard lichen 》 Usnea strigosa

Some lovely beard lichens I found at our campsite.

Caddo Lake State Park, Texas, 3 Aug. 2024

[wild-e-eep]

I think this one is red beard lichen - Usnea rubicunda - growing in straggly tufts on oaks.

[mostlythemarsh]

Me Nerves

[seabeck]

No fake spiderwebs here, just some ethically collected usnea! 

[bumblebeeappletree]

Lichen is a natural way to create various colors for your textile and craft projects depending on the type you forage and how you process it. Beard, wolf & lungwort (usnea, letharia vulpina & lobaria pulmonaria) are great lichen to start with since they are often blown away from their host and more easily collected from the forest floor. This tutorial will show the boiling water method of making dye from each type of lichen, as well as the resulting color swatch samples (wool, silk, bamboo & cotton).

CHAPTERS

0:00 Introduction - Lichen of PNW

1:32 Lichen varieties

3:53 Latin names

4:13 Ammonia method

4:55 Mordant

5:37 Foraging lichen

6:24 Lichen Dyes tutorial resource

6:52 Processing methods

7:47 Rock beard lichen

8:44 IFFS lichen dye samples

12:18 Boiling water method

13:58 Dyed fiber samples

15:25 Wrap up

16:48 Sneak peek of next tutorial

18:01 Blooper

SUPPLY LIST

Lichen - beard, wolf & lungwort

Pot with lid

Scissors

Spoon

Strainer

Textile

[drhoz]

The Great ACT-NSW-NZ Trip, 2023-2024 - St. Arnaud

After getting across Cook Strait without being shipwrecked (the weather was actually quite pleasant compared to some of the unholy gales that come through the gap, with the wind merely howling), we started our explorations of Te Waipounamu, the Island of Greenstone Waters. Pounamu is such a beautiful and useful stone that the Māori named the entire island after it.

Europeans called it South Island, or archaically New Munster. It covers 150,437 square kilometres, making it the world's 12th-largest island. We stopped at the Omaka Aviation Museum, which was worth it, but our first night was spent at St. Arnaud, formerly Rotoiti, a tiny alpine village.

It's certainly surrounded by mountains, and shows some really nice alpine geomorphology - hanging valleys left where subsiduary glaciers got cut off by the larger glaciers in the main valley, scree slopes where the greywacke of the mountains is disintigrating, and alpine lakes like Lake Rotoiti itself, formed when the glaciers retreated at the end of the last Ice Age and left behind huge piles of pebbles, gravel, and boulders to dam the meltwater.

On the other hand St. Arnaud has also been built right on top of a considerably larger geological feature - the Alpine Fault. This tectonic boundary between the Australian and Pacific Plates runs for over 600km, and is one of the fastest moving faultlines in the world, moving, on average, almost 40mm a year. Geological formations that originally straddled the fault are now 480km apart. Unfortunately most of that movement happens during huge earthquakes every few hundred years - the last big one on the Alpine Fault happens around 1717, rupturing 400km of the fault at once.

Over the last 12 million years a significant upwards element to the fault movement has been added, creating the Southern Alps. Most of what is now the South Island got pushed 20 kilometers up, whereupon New Zealand's weather promptly ground it 16 kilometers back down again. The assorted rubble forms the plains on the east and southern coast, or got swept north by prevailing currents on the west coast. Exposed basement rock on the South Island is mostly greywacke, or heavily metamorphised rocks such as schist from even deeper. That's where the greenstone originally formed.

Anyway, the next big quake will probably trash St. Arnaud completely, and cut every road across the mountains for months. Happily that didn't happen on this trip - @purrdence had enough problems with a cyclone cutting roads and trainlines last time.

The original forest around St. Arnaud is mostly Antarctic Beech (Nothofagus sp.) and forms the basis of a unique and seriously threatened ecosystem. I'll tell you all about that over the upcoming posts.

Here's some species I've covered before.

[thestonecuttersguild]

F-35 views, Oshkosh 2022.

[photo-biont]

Cow Heaven, May 25, 2024

[vothnthorvaldson-blog]

Usnea sp. (top) & Evernia mesomorpha (boreal oakmoss, bottom).

South of Saskatoon, SK, Canada. June 3, 2023.

[lichenaday]

Usnea trachycarpa

This lichen is a creature.

images: source | source

[wild-e-eep]

An apothecium of Usnea subfloridana.

[mostlythemarsh]

Where Will I Be?

[balthazarslostlibrary]

Some finds from a walk today.

1. Blackbird nest. The branch/small tree it was in had been blown down by recent storm, but the eggs were still warm to the touch so they must still be being incubated. Very cool.

2. Lacarrius sp. mushroom.

3. Usnea sp. or ‘beard lichen’. They were a lot greener in person but the exposure of my camera was fucked.

4. A weird little man formed from the roots of a tree growing around another species. He looks like a gross little goblin child I like him a lot.