Feb 29th, 2016: Fungi

[xoxoxoBruce]

Miss you Claudette.

Steve Axford like most photographers takes pictures around home, but unlike most lives on 7.5 acres of soggy Australia.
Soggy = fungi.

Axford owns more than 3 hectares of lowland subtropical rainforest close to Byron Bay in New South Wales, Australia.
There’s even a platypus living in the creek running through it.
“I am slowly replanting my land with original vegetation and I have planted over 2000 trees, so far,” he says.
The area is close to the Tweed volcano, so the soil is of a type rich in iron oxide, known as krasnozem soil.
It also gets about 1800 millimetres of rainfall a year, making it great for trees – and fungi.
“Fungi are stunningly beautiful, especially when they grow in perfect conditions, like in the rainforest,” Axford says.

I assumed fungi would be easy to photograph, but Axford says they tend to grow in the most inaccessible places.
“There are also lots of small critters around, to make life miserable, like mosquitos, leeches and ticks,” he says.
“We have paralysis ticks here, which can in extreme cases kill. But you get used to them after a while.”

Sure, that mosquito on the fungi is your friend, get use to them.
Get used to them like Aussies get used to 140 kinds 0f snakes and 10,000 kinds of spiders,
not to mention all the things in the ocean that are trying to kill you?
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