How d’ya like them puffballs, Google?

This time five years ago I was hunkering down into my Macro Monday blog series as the pandemic locked down on us all. Now we are at the short end of the lean mushroom season. Spring is about to, well, spring, so the temperatures will rise and fungi will fruit again in modest numbers.

With that in mind, I made a right fool of myself with my neighbour this week. But then again, at least I’m not threatening them with military invasion and putting tariffs on the bird identification information I share.

No, instead I got excited about what I thought was false puffball (Enteridium lycoperdon), a species of slime mould (not actually fungi, but growing in the same way and places) that can be observed at this time of year.

On the way out for my morning walk, I spotted some white mushrooming thing at the bottom of my neighbour’s fencepost. Wow, I thought, false puffball on our doorstep!

The organism was white, had appeared quite quickly, and was growing in a damp location on decaying wood. Perfect!

I sent some photos over to my neighbour to say what I’d seen. Obviously he had no idea what I was on about, and so he checked with his roofer who confirmed they had sprayed expanding foam (in two seriously random locations, in my defence) while working on the house the other day.

If false puffball is what it says it is, does that now mean that expanding foam is false false puffball?

For comparison, here’s the real thing from back in that fateful month of March 2020:

One thing I have learned from this process of misidentification is that my blog appears quite high up in the rankings on Google for ‘false puffball’. It comes at a time when Google emailed me to ask if they could feature some of my photos on their store blog and do an interview.

‘What’s in it for me and my phone,’ I asked.

One of the richest companies in the world, and it turns out they don’t want to pay to use your images or harness your knowledge and experience. What a bunch of puffballs. I hope you appreciate it’s the principle here that matters. Remember those, principles?

So it goes that the only way I have ever been paid as a photographer is when you lovely people ‘buy me coffee’ via my Ko-fi page. Thank you to everyone who has supported me.

Anyway, I hope Google like these absolutely stunning false puffball images. Shot on a Gaggle Tinsel 35c. Feel free to use guys! 🙂

Thanks for reading.