Damon, one of COMA's 'chefs extraordinaire', (Keith being the other) found this and along with a few other very young specimens at Tallman. This is the season for Hen of the Woods, Grifola frondosa, a delicious edible worth looking for at the base of deciduous trees. It is a grayish-brown annual polypore with a white pore surface, and blends in so well with its background that you have to train your eyes to look for its overlapping fan-shapped joined caps. I was with Chris Gales this past week photographing mushrooms and it was getting dark by the time we got out of the woods and into our respective cars. We had found no Hens. Chris was commenting on his eyesight, which he reckoned had deteriorated suddenly over the past month. Then as we were driving away, he braked and shouted back to me to get my camera. He saw three perfectly beautiful Hens in the dark around the base of an oak. It was so dark my camera's LCD monitor was black, but I took several shots with my flash hoping they wouldn't be too grainy -and that they would be more or less centered. Well, they are the best shots I ever took of this mushroom. And only one of them was not in the photo!