July Fungi

Fungi are autumn weather lovers, aren't they? Not around here, for we're finding a wide range of fungi in mid-summer. I don't enjoy finding them because of the difficulties of identifying them so had been hoping for a fungus holiday, but we keep stumbling across them. This is an example, growing in the gravel track of one of the mountain bike trails below Backies. At least it was easy to identify, being a very definite green: it's green brittlegill.... I think.

The bright colour of this one, found in Ferry Wood, was also helpful. I've identified it as the aptly named hintapink brittlegill, but.... it may well not be.

With this one, things start to get complicated. It was growing in a heap of what looked like chippings and small branches at the top of Golspie Glen. Its colour isn't very helpful but the radial marks on top of the cap....

....the chocolatey gills and the distinctive 'ring' - like a skirt - around the stalk have helped. I think it may be Agrocybe rivulosa, the wrinkled fieldcap. If it is, it's quite exciting as, to quote First Nature, it was, "Unknown until 2003 and added to the British list in 2004, this fieldcap has since become fairly common in southern England, where its spread has been entirely due to the practice of mulching flowerbeds using wood chippings," and is only, "recorded occasionally in Wales and Scotland, where it is most often seen on heaps or on deep layers of woodchip...."

This one was found in Beinn Bhraggie Woods and is fairly certainly identified as a bolete from the cap formed of pores rather than gills, as in a mushroom. Which of the many boletes it is proves far more difficult. 

However, I'm quite pleased with this one as I'm almost certain of the identification: it's an orange birch bolete, Leccinum versipellis.

This large fungus would have been very easy to identify if it had been a rather more brilliant sulphurous yellow, in which case the identification of chicken of the woods, Laetiporus sulphureus, would have been almost certain. As its name suggests, however unappetising it looks, it's cooked as a vegetarian alternative to chicken.