We're going on a bear - oops fungi - hunt!

On September 7th 2025, Liz Holden led some keen Inverness Botany Group members on a Fungi Foray in Newtonmore.   In spite of a forecast for rain, it stayed dry while we walked around Loch Imrich and the adjoining Folk Park (finishing up at the cafe and picnic site for lunch).  Liz was a mine of interesting information about the fungi we found and their interactions with the tree roots. The familiar toadstools or mushrooms are just the fruiting bodies of the underground network of hyphae called mycelium (fungal threads) that are underground. 

 The first stop was at a dead Larch trunk which sported some very large Dyer's Mazegill (Phaeolous schweinitzii) and lots of Sulphurtuft (Hypholoma fasciculare).  When a UV torch was produced, the Sulphurtuft glowed eerily!

Most of what we found was not safe for eating with the exception of a very big Cauliflower fungus (Sparassis crispa). It is delicious if found when it is white rather than the brown state of the one we found at the base of a Larch, but was definitely the biggest fungus we found being at least 30cm across.

Liz next to the Cauliflower Fungus

Liz explained about the different kinds of veils or protective coatings that protect the developing mushroom and which leave a trace on the mature mushroom.  The universal veil is an a bit like a soft egg shell and the mushroom develops inside and then bursts through as it grows.  An example from my garden is Orange Grisette (Amanita crocea) which emerges from a white "egg".

Orange Grisette from birth to mushroom

In some fungi, like the Fly Agaric, the remains of the veil stick to the cap in shreds until they are washed off by the rain. 

As well as fungi, we walked past a large area of Dwarf Elder (Sambucus ebulus) which flowers much  later than the familiar Elderberry (Sambucus nigra) and does not become woody.  The scent of the flowers could be smelt from a distance.  We were not the only ones to notice it as this male white tailed bumblebee was enjoying a feed.

Dwarf Elder is not common in Scotland as the distribution map below shows:

In Inverness-shire, most of the records are along the Spey valley and there is a large population at Ruthven Barracks, Kingussie.

If you are interested in learning more about fungi, here are two books I own that I found interesting:

Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake

and

 Fascinated by Fungi by Pat O'Reilly

Entangled Life is more of a scientific account of fungi and the current research and uses, especially of the mycelium (the underground network of fungus that can produce mushrooms) though it makes more interesting reading than that sounds!  Fascinated by Fungi has lots of photos of different fungi and interesting facts about them.

Floods, Fans and Stagshorns

 Over a week ago, we had several days of continuous rain (while the South of England had a heat wave!) which resulted in the Spey flooding the adjoining land.  Flooding is a regular occurrence here as Badenoch (the name of our local area) is Baideanach in Gaidhlig which means the drowned land.  Usually it happens in the spring when rain coincides with melting snow. Newtonmore escaped with just the lower Golf Curse being flooded but it was more dramatic in Kingussie where the Shinty pitch was covered in at least a couple of metres of water, and we couldn't resist going to have a look.

We also went to look at the Spey from the Bridge to the South of Newtonmore and the mosses on the parapet looked particularly good with drops of water on their fruiting spikes.

Mosses on Spey Bridge parapet

Although I was aware that different lichens have a preference for either acid or alkaline substrates (the surfaces they grow on), I had never really thought about mosses doing a similar thing.  Mortar and concrete are alkaline and when I looked at a stone wall in the village, it was obvious that the mosses were preferring the mortared areas, and the lichens favoured the stone.

Mosses preferring to grow on the mortar

A few more fungi have appeared in the garden.  Some were the traditional toadstool type like these brightly coloured waxcaps. 

Butter Waxcap (Hygrocybe ceracea) and Scarlet Waxcap (Hygrocybe coccinea)

There were also some more unusual forms.  There was one that was a completely new form for me.

Looking in the books I thought it might be Violet Coral which sounded quite exciting as it is uncommon. I was wrong - it is an earthfan and has the less alluring name of Stinking Earthfan (Thelephora palmata).   To quote the Collins Complete Guide to Mushrooms and Toadstools, it is a "Coral-like fungus with a repulsive smell of putrid garlic." I don't think it was that bad but it did smell like drains or a dog-poo bin! It is widespread but also uncommon so I should be grateful that it decided to come up in my "meadow" aka lawn.  Thanks go to Liz Holden for the IDs.

There are some common fungi with finger like growths.  This one was growing on a slice of wood:

Candlesnuff Fungus (Xylaria hypoxylon)

It looks like the snuffed out wick of a candle and grows on deciduous dead wood.

Another fingerlike fungus is growing out of a dead tree by Loch Imrich.

This is Yellow Stagshorn (Calocera viscosa) which is really common on dead wood, but on conifers this time.

NPMS and toadstools - large and tiny

 In a post a couple of years ago I mentioned that I survey plots for a scheme called  the NPMS (the National Plant Monitoring Scheme).  You can read more about it on their website here. Ideally, the plots are surveyed every year, twice a year, and I have endeavoured to do that for the 8 years  since the scheme started.  There are 1,207 squares being monitored and  I was rather surprised to find that of the hundreds of volunteer surveyors only 40 have manged to send in data every year.  As I was one of them, I even got a mention in the 2022 Annual Report.  Probably the only bit of botanical fame I will ever have!

On my visit to my plot up on Craggan (a local hill) there were a few fungi that caught my eye.  I don't have names for them but could admire them, none the less.  The first was a tiny toadstool with frilly points:

The others that caught my eye were much bigger and more colourful.  The first one was  about 4 cm across and has really wide gills.  Maybe a waxcap?

The second group were much bigger. That's my boot for scale.

 Most of the fungi we notice have those big fruiting bodies we call mushrooms or toadstools.  The majority of the fungus is underground in a web called the mycelium.  The fruiting bodies are produced  to manufacture and distribute their spores.

In the last photo you can see there is a rock with white patches.  Those white patches are lichens.  It might surprise you to know that they are also fungi.  Lichens are fungi which also have another organism inside, usually an alga.  Lichens often have different fruiting bodies called apothecia which look like little jam tarts or wine gums growing on the lichen and have the job of manufacturing spores. However, there are some lichens which actually grow tiny toadstools and I spotted one on a rock on my way home.

This interesting lichen is only about 5cm across and looks like a green crust with some pinkish blobs.  It gets more interesting as you get closer and look at those pink blobs.

The pink blobs are the heads of teeny tiny mushrooms just a few millimetres tall!  They also have the job of producing spores. Once you have your eye in, this lichen (Baeomyces rufus) is quite common locally in shady dampish woodland.

Finally, from rather pleasing facets of nature, to a not so pleasant one from my garden.  You may have read in previous posts that I have the misfortune to have New Zealand Flatworms in my garden and I wage a constant war of attrition against them as they eat earthworms almost to the point of  extinction.  I shifted a pile of fencing planks and found plenty of NZ flatworms underneath and dozens of their eggs, which look like shiny blackcurrants.  Each egg has several baby worms inside.  One had just been laid and I think the white patch on the flatworm must be its egg laying opening as I have not seen this before (and believe me, I have seen hundreds of flatworms!).

A NZ flatworm and a fresh egg

Panthers in the garden?

I am seeing fungi popping up in the garden a bit earlier than I expected - maybe something to do with the wet July?

An unusual purple one popped up in my raised beds.  The beds are a new addition to the garden this year and have loads of compost (from my compost heaps) which might explain the new fungi.

 

I have recently bought a microscope and I am having a lot of fun looking at lichens and their spores (that will be another post!) so I thought I would try and see the spores from this fungus.  To get  spore print, you just put the cap, gill side down on a piece of paper and leave it for a few hours. I put a microscope slide there as well. The photo shows a different fungus but you get the idea.

Getting a spore print (from another mushroom)

The results were a bit underwhelming!  The spores are very small and round and that's about all I could make out. They really all very small - about 7 um (micrometres) long,  That's 7 millionths of a metre or 7 thousandths of a millimetre. So about 140 would fit in a millimetre if lined up end to end.

Mushroom spores

I tried to ID it and thought it might be Lepista sordida, but I got some help from an expert friend (thank you ,Liz) and it is Wood Blewit (Lepista nuda). There were some older specimens which had lost their purple colour on the cap but were still purple underneath (though not that obvious in the second photo).

A more regular visitor is this one which pops up in the lawn each year, probably growing on birch roots. 

It starts off as a round bump in the grass and then pushes up to the more usual mushroom shape with a circular pattern of beige  flecks.

The flecks are the remnants of  the bag or veil that enclosed the growing mushroom and which breaks as it grow up, leaving the flecks on the top and a collar around the stem.

There is a bulbous base to the stalk and the gills are white

I thought it was Panther Cap (Amanita pantherina).  So did I have panthers on the lawn? I'm afraid not - I was wrong again! It is The Blusher (Amanita rubescens), so called because the flesh turns redder when bruised.  I did try this test but hadn't realised that the colour change is quite gradual so I was too hasty in assuming it did not change.  It all goes to show that a little knowledge is not enough when identifying fungi.  

Life and Death or both?

There are usually flocks of Greylag geese on the fields between Newtonmore Railway station and the Spey, and I often see them flying overhead in a V-shaped skein. Its scientific name is Anser Anser.

 I have never seen them around Loch Imrich,  but there was a dead one there this week. Greylag geese have an orange bill. It was near the gate onto the main road so maybe it is a road casualty.

Greylag goose corpse

A more promising sight was some Winter Aconite blooming in the woodland round the Loch.  Just in the one place and I suspect it originates from a garden throwout.

 I had planted some in my garden so hurried back to check on it.  Not a sign! Not even leaves.  Though there are snowdrops.

Finally, a interesting fungus on a golf course fence (Second Tee), with my finger in the photo for scale.

It was a wet day so the fungus was a bright orange.  It is obviously alive but I think it is one of the  wood decay fungi that live on dead wood and will cause the fence to rot as it the fungus digests it.  The "feeding" part is not the bit you can see in the photo but thin threads that penetrate the wood.  The visible parts in the photo are the fruiting bodies which will shed spores.  It might be Gloeophyllum sepiarum which I thought I had found before (see this post), but  that time an expert who looked at the photos later thought it was more like Lintneria trachyspora. However, like lichens, it's not easy to ID species just from a photograph.  (And as you can see, there are plenty of lichens on the wood as well, but they won't cause it to rot.)

Garden fungi and an interesting app

The recent wet weather might not be ideal for walking but it is encouraging lots of fungi to pop up in my lawn.  I am not a fungi expert at all and can only recognise a few obvious ones. This beautiful Fly Agaric (Amanita muscaria) appeared in the lawn.

Tuesday (left) and Wednesday (right)

It started off as a globe and is now like an umbrella - which is appropriate as the second photo was taken in the rain today. This is the archetypal fairy toadstool that has hallucinogenic properties.

A second toadstool appeared nearby. Just a nondescript brown one. I have no pictures of it in situ as my husband picked it to try out a new app he had installed on his phone. I am not a big fan of ID apps but I was impressed with this one which used the phone camera to look at the specimen from different angles until it had enough data to arrive at an ID.  Here are some pictures:

The app came up with the name Peppery Bolete (Boletus piperatus).  Being a suspicious sort I looked it up in a book to check if it fitted and I think it does.  It is a bolete because the underside has pores instead of gills. The stem  becomes yellow at the base (easier to see in real life than in the photo). It's associated with Birch trees and often grows close to Fly Agaric so the habitat is correct. The final test is to check the colour of the spores, which should be olive-brown.  To do this, you take off the stalk and put the cap on a piece of paper with a glass over it (so no draughts) and leave overnight.

The result is a perfect replica of the underside of the mushroom.  The spores are supposed to be olive-brown, but I think brown is close enough, given the other features.

The name of the app is Seek by iNaturalist and it is the same program for both iOS (Apple) and Android phones (the rest!).  You can read more about it here.  It identifies in real time so will use up your data if you are out of range of a wifi connection. It even managed to identify some lichens correctly!

A very botanical weekend

The beautiful sunny weather last weekend was ideal for some botany activities I had planned. On the Saturday, I took a group of people from the Inverness Botany group up Glen Banchor to look at lichens.  Our first stop was an old dry stone wall by the first cattle grid.  This has so many different lichens on it that you could consider it as a lichen hunter's heaven - or hell - as it is covered in crustose species that I can't identify! I had picked out some of the easier ones to spot and put them on a help sheet:

 Even then, you have to get close up and personal when trying to see the features.

A hand lens, x10, or a little device that clips on your phone can really help you to see the details.

Here are two favourites (anything with blood in the name seems to be popular!):

Blood spot lichen (Ophioparma ventosa) growing on the stone wall

Bloody Heart Lichen (Mycoblastus sanguinarea) growing on a birch tree

The Bloody Heart Lichen has black fruits (apothecia) on it but when scratched, it is orangey-red underneath.  This is because you are exposing an  orange alga that coexists with the lichen  (Trentopohlia).  Most algae are green.  Lichens have (at least) two components: a fungus and an alga.  The fungus gives the lichen its name and provides a home for the alga. The alga produces food by photosynthesis.

On the Sunday, I joined in a Fungus Foray around Newtonmore with Prof Bruce Ing. I was amazed at how many fungi a discerning eye can spot.  There were over 50 around Loch Imrich! 

The undersides have a variety of gills and pores from which the spores fall. Apparently a fungus has to grow very accurately vertical as otherwise the spores would get stuck on the sides of the tubes etc when the spores are released!

Bruce also provided a different ID for the log pile fungus (post has been updated) as Lintneria trachyspora.

Bruce is an expert on Slime Moulds and Mildews and for the first time ever I was delighted that so many plants in my garden had mildew! Bruce took away lots of sample leaves, as apparently each family of plants has a different species of mildew ... who knew?

And finally, a visit to a friend's garden produced lots of sightings of butterflies, so here is one I have not shown before. A Peacock (Inachis io). The caterpillars feed on nettles, and the adult butterflies overwinter in sheds and outhouses.

Fruits, fungus and flies

 Autumn is coming at last, after what has felt like an extended summer with no frosts yet.  Some of the birch leaves ae turning yellow and many of the plants have gone to seed or are bearing fruit.  This post will be heavy on photos as I have been capturing some of the different fruits I have seen locally.

But before then, a bit more on the fungus I mentioned in my last post (Amanita crocea). One of the toadstools became food for another fungus and grew a cap of white hair:

And I thought no fungus post would be complete without a photo of Fly Agaric, the archetypal fairy toadstool, which is quite plentiful locally.

The toadstools are actually the fruits of the fungus and are grown to distribute its spores.  The rest of the plant is beneath the ground as a network of threads. 

The bright red colour of many fruits seems particularly attractive to birds and in October the migrating Fieldfares and Redwings will strip the Rowan of its berries.

Rowan

Nothing seems to eat the red rosehips though.

Rosehips

Honeysuckle berries

Some of last year's leeks have been left to flower and are providing food for several bees and flies.

Finally, it always seems like autumn when the conkers appear on the Horse Chestnut.

There aren't many Horse Chestnut trees locally.  This one is on Glen Road, Newtonmore.