Flora and Fauna
A few of us at Ragdale have been meeting at 6:30 am every weekday morning for RunSwimRun club. I'm not usually a morning person, but it's so inspiringly beautiful here, I can't help myself. We run 2 miles through a quiet residential neighborhood to Lake Michigan, swim for a bit (it was too cold in August, but September brought warmer temperatures, go figure), and then run back. And there have been a few surprises along the way:
RUN: While stretching on the front porch before our run yesterday, we spotted this young deer eating apples from one of the trees in the front orchard.
SWIM: And then, less than half an hour later, while swimming in the lake, we saw a small furry beast paddling by. My first reaction was Otter! and R's was Aquatic Squirrel!, but we eventually (and more reasonably) ID-ed it as a muskrat.
RUN: Running back, I noticed what looked like a huge styrofoam ball sitting in one of the flowerbeds across the street from Ragdale. Ghostly white, with a smooth, pristine surface, it looked man-made. It struck me as a little strange, just sitting there like that in the dirt, but I didn't think anything more of it until I saw similar ones in the woods near the Meadow Studio. Coyote repellant? Giant mothball? I had to know. I asked around at dinner time, and was amazed to learn from one of the other residents that it was in fact a Puffball fungus. (Tasty when fried in butter, I'm told.) I went back and took a few pictures of the critter this morning:
Now that I know what it is, it doesn't look like styrofoam at all, but more like a giant white button mushroom.
Here it is with my hand so you can get a sense of scale!
And here's a beauty shot of the garden where it lives.
