I see this everywhere on the Canadian Shield in Ontario, for context
Lichen.
this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2025
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When purchasing my previous home, I asked the inspector about a suspicious goopy substance on a window.
"Goop," he labeled it, then advised me not to worry about it.
He was right; it was gone by the time we closed on the house and, as far as I could tell, never returned.
So anyway, are you that inspector? It would be nice to give him credit.
🙏
Looks to be in the family Parmeliaceae, which is pretty large. I'm really just beginning to learn how to ID but I might start at a genus like Xanthoparmelia or similar.
Tried using Seek by iNaturalist but it couldn't get any more specific than the rock shield lichens genus:
I'd wager it's some Hypogymnia sp. with the way the ends look.
I was reading thru the Wikipedia article on this to see if I could figure out which it might be, and even tho I didn’t find any likely looking ones (they seem to mostly be branching rather than plating like these ones?) I did find something fun:
If you go to the species subheading, you can see how somebody has added pictures for each one… for the first ten or so. It looks like they realized how fucking many of these things there are and gave up, which is just hilarious environmental storytelling imo