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Excerpts from Jim Conrad's
Naturalist Newsletter
from the June 7, 2009 Newsletter, issued from the Siskiyou Mountains west of Grants Pass, Oregon:
RUFFLED FRECKLE PELT LICHEN
On the same boulder down in the moist, sheltered valley where the Broadleaf Stonecrop is flowering there's a nice population of Ruffled Freckle Pelt Lichen, PELTIGERA LEUCOPHLEBIA. You can see part of a large carpet of its human-ear-size flakes plastered across a serpentine boulder's surface above.
This is one of those lichen species composed of three different kinds of organism, not just two. There's the fungus belonging to the family Peltigeraceae. The algal component belongs to the genus Coccomyxa, and then there's a cyanobacteria in the genus Nostoc.
Our lichen is gray, but many pictures of it show a green body. When they're wet, the lichen's bright green algae constituent are clearly visible. The lower surface of the thallus is white.
Ruffled Freckle Pelt Lichen is widespread throughout the Pacific Northwest. It grows on mossy soil, as shown in our picture, but also sandy soil, mossy logs and the forest floor at all elevations. Usually you see it in conifer forests in the mountains..