Woodland surprise

I must confess that when I first saw what you see in today's photo, I didn't think it was what it turned out to be. 

I'm finding this brown winter difficult, sometimes, to photograph. Landscapes, particularly, aren't satisfying me at all, so I decided to wander across my little patch of forest and look for small things that came my way.  And that's how I found this.

When I first saw it, I thought it was a curled up catepillar.  Readers from this region certain know about wooly bear catepillars that local legends say predicts the weather by the size of their red and black bands.  That legend aside, when you pick up one of those, they curl up into a defensive little fuzzy ball. And when I first found this, I thought it was some catepillar, though obviously not the red and black wooly bear, that was doing the same defensive move.

But then I touched it and turned it over and discovered it was the underside of a piece of fungus or mushroom, species unknown to me. I still can't tell you what kind it is. Only this piece of it was left.  Somehow it hadn't rotted or turned black in the winter.  I just liked how it looked, a little not-caterpillar curled up among the leaves.