At the end of the day on Monday, as we finished up looking at and measuring trees in our plots, the 104-degree heat in the north coast interior was a bit distracting. But I noticed this guy growing on a black oak and wanted to take his picture (sorry for the blurriness) before he gets old and dried-out.

This is a fresh fruiting body of Phellinus gilvus. The black oak on which it was growing has for several years displayed bleeding cankers that are probably caused by P. ramorum. (I haven't sampled and tested them, but several other black oaks in the immediate vicinity have been infected.) In their book A Field Guide to Insects and Pathogens of California Oaks, Ted Swiecki and Elizabeth Bernhardt note that this fungus decays the sapwood of trees infected with P. ramorum and also often decays dead trees.

Most people interested in ecology already know this, but you can't mention it too often: some of the most valuable members of our forest communities are the ones that decay others, recycling nutrients through the greater ecosystem and basically cleaning up the messes--like accumulations of dead branches and trees that could serve as fuel for fires--attendant on the normal processes of animal and plant death.

Plus, fungi are simply interesting in their own right. They have myriad strategies for inhabiting and digesting other living and dead things, and they come in a variety of fascinating shapes and colors. Here is a mini-salute to some of the other decay fungi we sometimes come across in the Douglas-fir/hardwood forest up here in the north coast.

Unfortunately, some of the fungi that decay hardwoods are much more obvious now that P. ramorum has killed so many trees in our region.