Fungi Friday 🍄

Dulwich, south-east London, August 2023

A post about a fungus that always seems to be on oak logs (and will win no photographer of the year awards).

I was passing a pile of oak logs that had been chopped up last winter after the tree fell across a footpath. My colleague thought they were black bulgar, which is probably true, but it’s important to check the difference with witches’ butter. That fungus is more of a jelly, whereas black bulgar could probably be seen as looking a bit more like King Alfred’s cakes.

Again, gosh, the pics are bad, but you can see they are different to King Alfred’s cakes because of the disc-shape emerging. I also passed this collection of logs a few weeks ago and there was no fungus there, whereas if it was King Alfred’s cakes, I would have expected to see a purple-black early growth of KAC.

Black bulgar always seems to appear on fallen oak logs or timber the following autumn, but then don’t appear again after that. It shows how much there is a need for fallen and decaying wood to maintain wider ecological diversity in woods.

Thanks for reading.