Limited Shelf Life

On one of my recent hikes through the autumn woods, I snapped a brightly colored maple leaf that found a resting place on a shelf mushroom.

For those not familiar, shelf mushrooms (or bracket fungi) grow on the side of trees (living and dead). When you find them, they’re usually attached to rough barked trees.

There are dozens of shelf mushroom varieties – different sizes, shapes and colors. They are known by a variety of descriptive names – beefsteak fungus, sulphur shelf, birch bracket, dryad’s saddle, artist’s conk, and turkey tail…and others.

The classification, Polypores, is often used for the type of the hard or leathery fungi (like the one pictured here) that lacks a stem, growing straight out of wood.  The polypore’s woody fruiting bodies are called conks.

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