Swinsty Fungal Foray 17th September 2024

A lovely sunny day and seven of us met to look for fungi in the woods at Swinsty car park with some success as outlined as follows.

Walking round the picnic tables was encouraging with a few finds including the Brown Birch Bolete – Leccinum scabrum, a toadstool with pores not gills and mottling on the stem. (Photo) Needless to say this was under a Birch tree, it is important to note where the specimen is found, under which tree or in grassland, on wood or leaf litter.

Another early find was a wonderful bright orange fungus with gills that descend onto the stem, the False Chanterelle, Hygrophoropsis aurantiaca.

We then entered the wood itself but found the ground dry and had to look quite hard to find specimens. Dead lying wood is a good source and here we found another form, a bracket fungus with pores and small hairs, the Hairy Curtain Crust – Stereum hirsutum. (Photo) Some species  grow in groups such as Sulphur Tuft – Hypholoma fasciculare (Photo). Another brightly coloured gill fungus is Yellow Pluteus – Pluteus chrysophaeus, (photo) the Pluteus family produce pink spores and have free gills, that is the gills do not meet the stem.

Puff Balls are yet another type with spores produced inside a “ball/cap” and are released by the cap splitting or by forming a hole in the top. The one we found is  Common Puffball – Lycoperdum perlatum (Photo).

We were very pleased to have found a number of different sorts of toadstools and were very grateful for the help of Jo Prowse who did a lot of the identifying using various techniques at home. The only disappointment was that we did not find the one fungus many people recognise, the Fly Agaric but non the less an excellent day out, the final list was of over 20 species most of which are seen in the top photo so well displayed by Jo.

Josephine Drake

Photos Jo Prowse and Josephine Drake