Fungi Friday 🍄

Low Weald of West Sussex, Sunday 19th November 2023

I managed to get out to the Low Weald of West Sussex/Surrey border to a special area of woodland. I won’t name the exact site as it’s a Site of Special Scientific Interest and there’s been an increase in foraging recently, which is illegal here. There are now posters up warning visitors not to pick fungi.

The woods were in that lovely peak autumn beech colour.

My first sighting was what birders call a ‘life-tick’, not a parasite for life, but a species I’d never seen before! That mushroom was ballerina waxcap which, as with most waxcaps, was growing in grassland. This one was actually in a grass grave.

This walk also included an encounter with one of the largest stretches of any mushroom that I’d seen before. Clouded funnel seems to be a mushroom of old or stable habitats in SE England, almost always woodland. This line was maybe 25metres long? Amazing.

The common puffballs were definitely approaching the season’s end.

Honey fungus has fruited later into the season I think, possibly due to the dry and hot September/October. I think this is the common honey fungus.

Bonnets tend to stick it out later into the season, particularly during the frosts. I’ve not done enough work on bonnets to identify this species confidently.

Another lovely little quartet which are also bonnets.

It hasn’t been a vintage year in the SE for porcelain fungus, but the best results for these images are from the underneath with supplementary lighting (phone torch usually works fine).

For this photo I used the built-in ‘focus stack’ feature in my camera. It’s worked pretty well, and was handheld, which is one of the great recent tech advances in photography. Sorry… these are blewits, but I am a bit lazy defining them as either wood blewit or field blewit.

As per previous bonnets, not sure of the species but I love photographing them.

This was an interesting one. I think this is brick tuft, which I hadn’t seen before. It’s different to sulphur tuft in its size, colour and sturdiness. It was growing on a log or stump.

There was some sulphur tuft around but as you can see it is quite different to the other mushrooms.

I enjoyed this little polypore, maybe a young turkey tail, in one of the many puddles.

Hello butter cap! This mushroom was present in huge numbers, we’re talking thousands. It’s very variable as the pics show, but one key feature I have noticed is the unusual swelled base where the stipe meets the soil.

This rather sorry looking polypore is my first chicken of the woods of 2023 – how sad is that! Again, I think the climate crisis early autumn dealt them a blow.

Another polypore that I haven’t seen much of this year (tree officers, rejoice!): giant polypore.

The polypore trend continues with this hen of the woods growing on a beech tree.

Towards the end of the walk I saw some people who I thought had been foraging loitering around a gate. They looked over my way and headed off. Nearby I saw this fallen tree with lots of wrinkled peach – bingo! These weren’t dripping in that spectacular way that the mushroom can, but it’s always good to see an uncommon shroom in this number.

My final fungal encounter was with this beautiful spread of small polypores. They’re probably trametes (turkey tails).

Thanks for reading.