Outdoor Nature Hour: downy woodpecker & mushrooms

We have been remiss in keeping up with our Handbook of Nature Study. There's been lots going on, travelling up and down 75, and this week I have refused to go anywhere. So our assignments from the past two weeks are the downy woodpecker and mushrooms.
We read about the downy in the HNS and know we have many around our farm. Were they anywhere around when we went looking? Of course not. But there's lots of deadfall along the creek and so we examined this tree

and all of its woodpecker holes:

Shadow often chaperones our walks. Just making sure everyone's ok at the homeplace. While this tends to drive me a bit crazy, one of the advantages of homeschooling is you can just leave the class and go jump on your pony.

That's until your mom yells at you to come back and look at these mushrooms.

We tried to make spore prints out of two different types of mushrooms but neither took. Hayes said they looked dead and maybe that's why our experiment failed.

When we were in South Carolina a few weeks back, we examined these mushrooms growing on trees along my grandmother's street. These are called turkey tails. (Again, I jumped out of the car to take a picture but I'm not admitting this is a habit or anything. I'm just sayin'...)

So we finished all of that and walked all the way to the back pasture. Several weeks ago, the creek flooded and actually ruined this paper wasp nest up the hill that we were hoping to save for future study.

Oh well. For more Outdoor Nature Hour, click on Barb's Handbook of Nature Study blog.