{Quite a month it’s been. The library is officially in its new digs, as am I, and it’ll take a while still for both of us to get used to it. I’ve already encountered several stray cats, a very forward chipmunk, and more giant fungi than I ever imagined to reside in this city. With such fungi, as it turns out, come the Pleasing Fungus Beetles, which is a name so utterly quirky that it could only belong to an insect (see the Question Mark butterfly, Small Elephant Hawk Moth — which may be the most animals in a row I’ve ever seen in a species name — and so on).
The Pleasing Fungus Beetle looks like an awful lot of other beetles, except for the bits that don’t, so it took me quite a while to figure out just what the shiny little chaps were. I’m fairly certain I’ve never even seen one before, and certainly not in mushroom-munching swarms like these had. It’s possible I simply missed them underfoot, as I would have done this time if one hadn’t taken a break from his mushroom lunch to crawl around on the grass and say hi to me.
They’re more yellow-orange than red-orange — I’ve cheated twice here, making him red and using August’s color a day late in the first place — but artistic license and so on. If it helps, there are in fact a variety of Pleasing Fungus Beetles in a variety of Pleasing Colors, and some of those are certainly red. The mushrooms, or at least parts of them, were properly red, just like the one I stumbled on around this time last year (though a less poisonous-looking shade).
Perhaps the fragrant fungi and general dampness of these nonstop rainy days have something to do with my irritatingly persistent cold over the last few days … or perhaps, as always, my immune system somehow managed to anticipate the three-day weekend so it could incapacitate me accordingly. It’s certainly preferable over taking a sick day during the work week, but truly, one of these days it would be nice to spend a minor holiday doing something other than drinking hot soup and ginger ale….}
shetland + pony 