What a great day with Kent Field Club at Hemsted Forest.
I have borrowed Phil Ambler's photos for this post, as mine were rubbish - I hope he doesn't mind! Notice the "flesh colour" (seen once it matures) and the very rubbery nature of the cap.
Wildlife in and around Hadlow in the Low Weald of Kent, and further afield.
What a great day with Kent Field Club at Hemsted Forest.
I have borrowed Phil Ambler's photos for this post, as mine were rubbish - I hope he doesn't mind! Notice the "flesh colour" (seen once it matures) and the very rubbery nature of the cap.
Of course when I went past these, I immediately thought Candle-snuff fungus, Xylaria polymorpha.
However, there are those hints of pink tips, the solitary nature of the slender curving fruiting bodies, and perhaps the otNOT her fungal species, the mould growing over the fruiting bodies. All these are hints towards Xylaria longipes. But they are growing on one of the ancient Hornbeam coppards along the old woodbank. Could it be......?
This is a beauty - but is it a Polypore or a sort of wrinkled crust?
A close-up of the surface, sharpened in Topaz,
I walked over to a line of Alders with one noticeably struggling tree in the middle of the line, and indeed there were multiple early fruiting bodies of Inonotus radiatus, (Mensularia radiata) the Alder Bracket, "lumpily" resupinate and quite velvety at this stage, apricot or tan coloured, with limited pore development, the basidiomes forming the typical "ladder" feature up the trunk. The trunk was already splitting and lifting.
So on one branch my eye was drawn to a few small ovals of white fringes, each about an inch long, which it turned out appeared to be surrounding some thin dark brownish-grey oval crusts.
With this unusual colour combination, perhaps these represent early development of a Coniophora species crusts, perhaps Coniophora puteana, a common cause of wet rot, or perhaps another species such as Coniophora arida? These and others are found in the south of England, so both are possibles. That's all I can think of, anyway!
Slightly more lacerate than usual, but not a British species I think. Impossible to resolve without measuring the spores under a microscope, but I should have tried to measure the pore density at least.