An ear by any other name.

Another trip to the forest this afternoon, in search of fungi. The dead men's fingers that I photographed the other day are still pointing to the sky on and around an old tree stump. Since my last visit they have been joined by what look like the ears of the dead men. They are the fruiting bodies of another fungus, Auricularia auricula, commonly known as jelly ears, that makes it living by breaking down dead wood.

In an unfortunate bit of anti-semitism the fathers of mycology originally called the fungus Herneola auricula-Judae, the Jew's ear because of its habit of growing on dead elder trees Sambucus nigra, the tree on which Judas Iscariot is traditionally thought to have hung himself. Given that the elder is not native to the Palestine region, this story is probably untrue!