Unidentified Coral Mushroom

We are experiencing a flush of fungi recently. Not a riot by any means but it seems like a plentitude after the last two years of drought. I’m enjoying encountering them, but there are so many that defy my primitive abilities of fungus identification.

I thought identifying coral mushrooms, at least as to genus, would be easy, but no. All the species listed in my Audubon guide fail by date of appearance - these are earlier by at least a month or two than the early to late summer that seems to be the rule there. And the most obvious candidates fail in their distribution - red coral, for instance, is a coral of the western US. And then there is the habitat - so many of these are specified as preferring conifers, and these were on the slopes under red oaks, tulip poplars, and ash.

Well, I’ve found that appearance times for mushrooms are often plain wrong in our area, often by months. From morels to chanterelles, the only rule here is that they will appear, but as to when is anyone’s guess. Likely range and habitat can be similarly variable.

Credit: Wayne Hughes, May 2009; photographed in the rolling hills of the Wolfskin district of the northeast Georgia Piedmont; used by permission. [source].

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