The Huge Rodent and Me

My neighbor said that a prairie dog, and she saw it, dug up her pretty plants, and I said "I'll shoot it." But she persuaded me it had the same right to live that we did, and I said I was just teasing because I don't shoot defenseless animals unless they bother me.

I'd never seen a prairie dog on this property, maybe because they can't dig here much; the soil is one inch of loam on top of six inches of clay on top of sandstone. Prairie it's not. But I did notice things happening: Bricks I'd carefully piled around the onion/flower beds had tumbled over. I found a pair of Green Cracking Russula mushrooms in the lawn and hoped for more because they're edible, and when I looked for more I found them like this:

I scratched my head. Squirrels do bite on these things, but chew the tender parts to shreds, no. And then I was sittin' workin' and I saw (now, it looks like a Loch Ness photo, but I swear it's genuine) in my yard a prairie dog, a cross between a rat and a squirrel, except much bigger, and in prehistoric times they were man-sized. They know this, having discovered skeletons in 2011:

Image source: A site interestingly called AccurateShooter.com. (Does your ex-boyfriend look more like the figure on the right, or the figure on the left? Either way, you have my sympathy.)

I took what photo I could of the prairie dog. It must have been around here quite a while because it knows my temperament and the extent of my patience for large rodents who chew on my mushrooms. As I turned the doorknob to go outside and get a better photo, it turned tail (it's a black-tailed prairie dog) and fled.

Mushroom ID Technique: The Spore Print

Was it an edible "Green Cracking Russula" (Russula virscens) or a mere moldy-looking shroom? If the former, according to the books, it's three weeks early, so I wasn't certain. One credible form of evidence is a spore print. Cut the cap from a fairly fresh shroom and lay it gills down on a plain white or black surface for 2 to 24 hours; when you don't have a guide to tell you whether the spores of your suspect mushroom should be light or dark, tape together pieces of black and white paper and lay the cap in the middle. The spores here left a ghostly white print, as the book said; other ID indications are the cracked, "mosaic-like" greenishness on top, cream-colored gills, size (3"), situation (often found singly, as this one was), convex top, brittleness, and thick stalk. Edible, even said to be good, but not appetizing. And also on the plate were what I thought might be chanterelles, again about two weeks early, but there are many trumpet-shaped mushrooms, some not good eating. These must have been older; they did not leave a spore print.