Some September Fungi & Moulds

I still don't know whether it is that this year has been exceptional for fungi or whether it is that we have simply become much more aware of them but we continue to find superb specimens in the woods around Golspie. Some are notable simply because they look pretty, like these sulphur tufts growing on a moss-covered log, some because....

....they are a rather gorgeous colour. This is a fly agaric, a species which is usually bright red and the classic fungus of fairy stories and emojis, but this was an unusual and very rich yellow-orange.

The trouble with fungi is that there are so many thousands of species and considerable variation even within a species, that any identification a pathetic amateur like me makes, except in classic cases like fly agaric, is very unlikely to be right.

This is a good example. It might, just might be curry milkcap, Lactarius camphoratus, which would be easy to confirm if we were collecting fungi to eat, which we definitely are not. As it begins to dry, it delivers a rich smell of curry powder, and we'd be able to confirm that it is a milkcap as this refers to the milky latex released from the gills under the mushroom cap when they are cut or torn which, again, is something we avoid doing.

One of our main interests in these fungi is simply their elegance so the fact that this may, just may be trooping funnel, Clitocybe metachroa, is very incidental. Doing justice to their elegance can be difficult: the picture is embarrassingly out-of-focus.

This one might be Amanita virosa, the destroying angel, which is a rather irrelevant piece of information if you've eaten one as it is, as its name suggests, very poisonous.

This is a terrible picture and wouldn't normally be allowed to lower the tone of this blog but it's included because it shows the biggest fungus yet, the large one being about a foot across. It was at the bottom of a steep, scrub-covered slope which I didn't dare descend. I think it's a parasol mushroom.

Lastly, this picture illustrates the frustration of this fungus-finding game. There are two tiny species here, the ones at the back being about 5mm long. The one at the front which is a bit out-of-focus resembles white caviar, and is quite different to the one at the back. I don't know whether they are fungi or slime moulds, related or unrelated, but I might have had a better idea if, on the two occasions we returned to the site to find them to take a better picture, we had been able to locate them again.

The white caviar one may be Tapioca Slime Mould, Brefeldia maxima, its tiny white balloon structures being described as, "slightly bigger than a pinhead."

I struggled to find anything on the internet which resembles the more distant one, the nearest being 
Honeycomb Coral Slime Mould, Ceratiomyxa fruticulosa.