I went on a little forage on Sunday to look for some cramp ball fungus (I have just bought a fire piston), my eagle eye girlfriend spotted a big cluster of them so I took a few older black ones to dry out. On our little excursion through the woods we spotted loads of mushrooms and despite my best efforts to identify them in some of my mushroom books I could not find any of them. Is someone able to point me towards a good resource to teach how to identify mushrooms... what mycological characteristics to look for and how to them find them in identification books or online, etc.
Here are some of the mushrooms we saw on our travels:
1. Looks dead, but was a huge bracket fungus on a chopped down oak. I did discover that oak trees can have a huge parasitic fungus that rots the inside of the tree and when the fruiting body is seen then the tree is lost... But this chopped down oaks insides looks healthy to my untrained eye. Any ideas what this is, or if it is the parasitic fungus I found in one of my books (
Inonotus dryadeus)?
2. Jelly-like, black, dead oak - bulgaria inquinans? (in the uk?)
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7. This looks like a puffball to me... but growing on a tree stump? Or is it growing from the moss? I thought they grew on the ground, so what is it?
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Thanks,
Matt