(Omphalotus nidiformis) is putting on its winter display across the southwest — 36 sightings logged from Kings Park to the jarrah foothills near Kalamunda over the past month and a half. Australia's only bioluminescent mushroom emerges wherever dead wood lies on the woodland floor, breaking it down into soil nutrient while glowing a faint, unmistakable green in the darkness.
This seasonal pulse is quiet work — the fungus fruiting in winter's cool, damp months when the forest floor is saturated and decomposition runs at its steadiest pace. Each cap is a small engine of nutrient cycling, feeding on cellulose and lignin that would otherwise lie inert, shuffling carbon and nitrogen back into the ecosystem's foundation. For anyone walking these woods at night, it is nature's own bioluminescence, needing no electricity to illuminate the underside of logs.
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The laughing kookaburra, an invasive species introduced to Western Australia from the east, is active at this hour too, and it takes small vertebrates, lizards, and the occasional young marsupial. The presence of kookaburras in Perth bushland is one of several pressures the quenda contends with, alongside fox predation and habitat fragmentation. But at dusk, in intact scrub with dense understorey, the quenda moves in cover. It is not often seen. If you are near low banksia scrub or regenerating bush right now, look for the small conical diggings in exposed sandy soil. They are easier to find than the animal that made them.
The ghost fungus grows on dead wood in this bushland, and in the long summer evenings it is faintly visible after dark, a pale luminescence on the bark of old logs. The quenda passes these without interest. It is looking for something that moves, or something that smells like it recently did. The sky above the canopy is still blue at the horizon. The air smells of warm eucalyptus resin and dry sand. Somewhere in the understorey, a small animal is pushing its nose into the ground.
