CATS AND MUSHROOMS OF VERUDELA

It was a sunny November morning and I had some things to do in the city. The city in question is Pula, the nearest one to my hometown. I had to drive only ten kilometers to get there. All I'm presenting in today's post was, let's say technically, photographed in Pula, but you won't see any of the typical or iconic city stuff here because...

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... well, because after finishing the chores, I drove a couple of kilometers from the historic center to the seaside area with pine groves, parks, beaches, and some big hotels that were considered very luxurious back in the eighties when they were fresh & new, and didn't look like anything else in Pula.

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The place is called Verudela and is very colorful and crowded in summer. Now, and when all the photographs you'll see in this post were taken, Verudela is enchantingly quiet. Hotels are empty. Beaches are deserted. Only the trees are whispering at the limit of audibility.
The trio of mushrooms shown in the above photograph was still and silent. Their neat alignment looks very cool.

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Behind the mushrooms, there was this relatively small, shrub-like fig tree.

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Some of its leaves started changing color and falling.

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All the mushrooms you saw till now in the post and most of those you'll see further in this November story, belong to one species.

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These are all Agrocybe praecox fruiting bodies.

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The second species, shown only in this and the following photograph ...

... is a species unknown to me. I mean, I encounter these and similar mushrooms from time to time, but I'm unable to identify them. In this photograph, you can see the fruiting bodies in ambient light, while in the previous one, I used the flash to illuminate the gills under the cap of the mushroom in the center of the group.

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The cats were congregated near one of the closed summer restaurants about fifty or sixty meters from the mushrooms.

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Most of them were young and playful.

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One of the older ones looked exactly like one of my cats that died a few years ago. It was like seeing a ghost. In the following photograph ...

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... the focus is on the mushrooms again. This Agrocybe praecox pair was almost as photogenic as the trio shown earlier in the post.

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This solitary mushroom of the same kind didn't look too bad either.

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Here you can see the Crepis sancta flowers that were growing near the mushrooms. The flowers in the foreground were lit by the morning sun while the rest was in the shade. That combination of shadows and light provided a nice, clean background and a visually appealing contrast in this shot.

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I photographed these two leaves on the clean, trodden ground under the pine, about twenty meters from the mushroom. Each leaf is a young Arum maculatum plant. The barren ground gives a surreal feel to the scene. The leaves look like sculptures representing two abstract characters talking to each other.
Once the art infects your mind, you see it everywhere!
In this case, I used the small, built-in flash of my camera combined with a certain exposition to separate the background from the stuff in the foreground.

Here you can see the Sonchus oleraceus plant that has found its living place very close to the trunk of a big old pine.
OK, that's enough of plants & fungi, at least for now, let's see what's going on with the cats.

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According to this photograph, at least one of them was busy scratching.

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This one was ready to catch the laces of my shoes.

The one shown in this shot was just passing by, I guess.

Here you can see a sleepy black cat that was napping under the pine.

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This is my favorite cat-themed shot from that November day. I like it becouse it shows some Pizzas on the lateral facade of the nearby restaurant and the cat's face resembles Garfield's. That combination of Italian food and a well-fed cat looked endearing and funny to me.

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This young cat was caught in an interesting pose that resembled some kind of yoga-related exercise.

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And that's all when it comes to the cats of Verudela. But I have two more mushrooms to show you before the end, so stay tuned a little bit more.

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These Agrocybe praecox fruiting bodies show some cracks on their caps.

Here you can see the same group of mushrooms from a slightly different angle.

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This entrance to the ant underworld was photographed nearby.

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In this fungal portrait, the Agrocybe praecox is showing its brown gills.

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Here you can see the barren branches of the Prunus spinosa tree.

AND THAT'S IT. AS ALWAYS HERE ON HIVE, THE PHOTOGRAPHS ARE MY WORK - THE END.