Fungus Corner

If you walk up the road to Golspie Tower and then onwards along this track through the Sutherland Estate forestry you come to a crossroads with Queen's Drive. Along the last hundred metres the verges are crowded with more fungi than we have seen together in any other location. It's probably a brief blooming but we've often noticed interesting fungi here before, if not in such numbers.

I hesitate to guess how many species were present but if I had to I would say about ten. To make matters worse, they aren't easy to identify. This may be slippery jack but there are so many similarly coloured  boletes it's difficult to be certain.

Even when they have a strong colour like red it isn't always a sure guide. I think this is hintapink brittlegill even though it's rather orange mostly because it has....

....a slim stem while....

....this may be the beechwood sickener because it has a different stem and....

....an even more startling colour. The trouble in confusing these two is that the brittlegill is edible while the  sickener, as the name suggests, isn't.

Fortunately, this one is easy to identify as fly agaric, a fungus I had hoped not to find quite yet as it is, to me, a sure sign of the onset of autumn.

Then there were junior versions like this one which could have been any of the above three species. Why can't fungi be EASY to identify?

Well, maybe this one is, if nothing else for its size. It is a penny bun.

There were so, so many more but I'm going to stop now because I'm exhausted with the process of trying to identify them.

Special thanks to Mrs MW for hanging around while I took over 100 photographs: for the first time since we've been here the midges were terrible, and she'd left her midge spray at home.