Tiny Tuesday : : Lichen and Lace

A few years ago I went on a hiking tour of the Bouverie Preserve, a large conservation property in the Valley of the Moon. The docent who led our hike was a trove of interesting stories about the ecology of the property*. She told us that she had a group of experts who requested a lichen tour. She said the tour lasted three hours and they never left the parking lot!

Lichens are common and plentiful around here and there are definitely a lot of different kinds, ranging from lace lichen to today's colorful orange and green one growing on a three inch long stick. 

I have spent a couple of hours researching lichen in an effort to identify this one, which caught my eye because of the little 'umbrellas' rising above the coral-like orange tangle atop the green lichen. I barely scratched the surface.

There are three kinds of lichen, crustose, fruticose, and foliose. I still don't know if my picture is two different kinds of lichen or whether they are two parts of a single one . If I had to hazard a guess, I would say that the green one is foliose because of its two sided 'leaf'  structures, and the orange is fruticose because of its tangled, coral-like structure. 

It's raining again today with up to three inches expected tonight and tomorrow, so this little twig that I found underneath the oak trees has kept me occupied all afternoon and made me realize how much there is to learn about so many things....

And then there is fungus....

*this was before the devastating Nun's fire which roared through the preserve, burning the library/classroom buildings and scorching almost all of the 535 acre property...the same fire which came within a half mile of our house.