Something interesting in the woodpile!

 We had a delivery of a pile of miscellaneous sections of tree trunks for chopping up for the fire, some of which must have been sitting around for a while. On one pine section, a small round growth  about 1cm in diameter appeared with a white border and a beautiful maze like pattern in the centre.

More patches appeared. Our best guess was that this was a fungus with a sterile white border and a spore producing section in the middle.

The photos were taken with a mobile phone and the white circle around the photos is a cut down plastic cup which works really well to keep your phone steady at at a fixed distance while you focus. Not knowing much about fungi, a search on the internet suggested it might be Antrodia ramentacea Honeycomb Crust which seems to be quite uncommon with just 11 records in Scotland, so it would be good to get an ID. In fact, advice from the Facebook page of the British Mycological Society put us right - it was not  Honeycomb Crust but the more common Conifer Mazegill (Gloeophyllum sepiarum).  This is fairly typical of an inexperienced beginner jumping to the wrong (more rare option)!  Conifer Mazegill is a bracket fungus so seeing it in this form was a bit confusing. However, later small brown brackets did appear on the side of the log.

Top surface of bracket

Underside of bracket showing the gills

Conifer Mazegill is much more common, and there are 239 records in Scotland - though none for Newtonmore so maybe worth recording after all.  The information on what is recorded is freely available on the NBN Atlas, for all sorts of animals and plants, not just fungi.  This fungus produces brown rot in wood. However, it has also been investigated for inhibiting tumour growth in some forms of cancer.

Update: After an expert checked the photo, this is probably Lintneria trachyspora