Autumnal fungi finds

I've just come back from the field trip to Dartmoor. There were many mushrooms. While the students were slaving over their quadrats on Hay Tor in horizontal drizzle, I interrupted proceedings to show them some of the strange fungi growing there. The most marvellous was a Parrot wax-cap (Hygrocybe psittacina):

CC image by Gljivarsko Drustovo Nis (photostream has many amazing fungi photos)

It was very like the one in the photo, with a stipe changing from orange to green, a green and very slimy cap, and superbly contrasting yellow gills.

Wax caps like grassland that hasn't been (so-called) "improved" - they prefer ancient pasture that hasn't been artificially fertilised or ploughed up. You can download Plantlife's wax cap / grassland fungi guide , and this has a scoring system for the different species. You might like to use this system on a grassland that you visit, and report in your field notebook. The higher the score, the more conservation value of the habitat.

Also whilst noodling about on the internet in search of fungi-related things, I found this Danish website: Mycokey MMI. It's a rather fun way of trying to identify your mushroom - I particularly liked the way you can choose the colours and the gill shapes that match. I don't know how closely our fungal flora matches Denmark's. And I don't know how well it would respond to half-eaten slightly sad specimens. But it could be worth a go, it might certainly get you to the right family so you can pick up a British book and have a look in there.

CC image by Andrea Westmoreland

Another species someone brought in for freeze drying today was a Bird's nest fungus (Cyathus sp.) which are hilarious little groups of shaggy cups with "eggs" in. The eggs are spore-containing structures called 'peridioles'. I liked them a lot. When rain hits the cups, the peridioles ping out and stick to neighbouring Things. Then gradually they release their spores. The reproductive cycle is actually a bit more complicated than that (as these things often are), if you're interested.

P.S. I have now scanned the dichotomous keys in my Marcel Bon mushrooms book, so if you'd like a pdf of them do ask (in a strictly sharing-something-out-of-print-for-mycological-enlightenment way, not a blatant ripping-off-of-copyright way, of course). You will remember that showing your abilities with a dichotomous key is one way to pick up marks, and most fungi books don't have such a thing.