Fungi Friday 🍄

Colgate, West Sussex, 11th September 2025

Good news if you like to listen to people talking about mushrooms: this post is accompanied by a podcast I recorded while taking the photos. You can listen to it on YouTube below or via the usual platforms.

A couple of things to point out – I made at least one mistake with the identifications. I talk about shaggy scalycap, but that is instead a more scarce species, flaming scalycap (I didn’t take photos during this visit).

I blogged about that last week.

Also the fly agarics in this post are seen right at the end of my time in the woods, so they didn’t make it onto the recording.

The first mushrooms I saw were these deer shields. They’re quite common in the south-east, but can be a bit variable. I have almost always seen them growing next to or from logs or fallen trees.

These are the slime moulds I talk about in the podcast. I thought they might be salmon egg slime mould, but I’m not sure at this point. I never count on identifying slime moulds, and I haven’t spent a lot of time trying to improve my knowledge of them. They require high magnification photography work, which I am doing less of these days. Sorry slimes!

Now then, this is what I head out there for! These are orange birch boletes. Note how the colour varies to the ones below.

As stated in the podcast, I spotted this orange birch bolete in the wreckage of a fallen beech limb. The light on the cap is actually the setting sun, not a camera flash!

This is the first Boletus edulis (cep, porcini, etc.) that I’ve seen this year. It was a hearty specimen but had been well nibbled by slugs, snails and more.

I’m seeing a lot of rollrims at the moment, and these were some of the first ones I’ve seen this year. Brown rollrim is deadly poisonous, and they can look similar to other members of that family. The caps have a ribbed edge to them which helps me to get them closer to an ID.

And to finish, on my way out of the woods, I spotted this “mother and child” fly agaric pair growing on a bank across from the track. They’re below birch and spruce trees, which they have a symbiotic relationship with. I’ve noticed this in other forestry sites as well, so maybe the spruce and birch are talking as well.

Thanks for reading.

More mushrooms: Fly agaric | Cep | Slime mould