More Fungi

We were up in Backies again today looking for some of those elusive croft eggs but returned by a different route, through forestry much of which is spruce and an environment the fungi seem to love. The trees have recently been thinned so it will be interesting to see whether the fungi approve of the increased light.

The first we encountered was a small group of almost perfect fly agaric, some of them....

....still in the process of powering themselves out of the earth.

Another old friend grows in just one spot in these woods and was doing well again this year. It's the aptly-named shaggy parasol.

We've found this one before and identified it as one of the boletes, perhaps the orange birch bolete, but the main interest in it is the way it's pushing itself into the moss of the bank out of which it's growing.

This one, with its shank of a startling, almost unbelievable colour, drove a coach and horses through my decision not to spend too much time trying to identify fungi. To make matters worse, none of my searches found it so I'm now left with the nasty feeling that I've discovered a new species of fungus but don't know it.

There were so many fungi that I stopped taking pictures of them unless they were perfect and of aesthetic merit, which included....

....this beautifully warm brown group of fruiting bodies bursting out of a rotten spruce stump.