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Nature Notes from Argyll
(and occasionally other places)
Sat 12 Sep - Thu 17 Sep 2009, based at Kindrogan, Perthshire
Photos from Liz Holden's fungus course at Kindrogan Field Centre, run by the Field Studies Council.
A big thanks to Liz for such a brilliant course. I highly recommended it. Link to next year's course is here.
The course followed a week of wet weather, which had caused fungi to spring up everywhere. The week of the course itself was dry and sunny, perfect conditions for fieldwork. My photos only represent a fraction of the species found. Virtually all the fungi were identified by Liz but I haven't put her as the identifier in the credits as I may have got some wrong when jotting hurried notes. Any wrongly labelled photos are my own mistakes.
I'm arranging the pictures by taxonomic groupings, just so as to help me learn these.
Boletales
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The Brown Birch Bolete and the Orange Birch Bolete. Both have the stem covered with dark flecks.
The Pine Bolete (Boletus pinophilus) in the pine woods at Rothiemurchus
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The Old Man of the Woods, Strobilomyces strobilaceus. The second picture was taken using flash, which I rarely do. The fungi were in the deep shade of an earth bank overhung with roots and moss.
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Slippery Jack (Suillus luteus) which was not at all slippery as the fine weather had dried it out, and the Velvet Bolete (Suillus variegatus)
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This the Velvet Rollrim, related to the common Brown Rollrim. It starts off with a suede-like cap but this soon loses its hair, though the stem remains hairy. When young the cap margins are inrolled, but on older specimens the cap is concave as in the picture below.
The Velvet Rollrim is grouped with the Boletes despite having gills rather than tubes.
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Even more surprising is that the Earthballs (Sclerodermataceae) are grouped with the Boletes, and not with the Puffballs (Lycoperdaceae) which belong with the Agarics. These are the Scaly Earthball (Scleroderma verrucosum) and the Potato Earthball (Scleroderma bovista).
All photos and other content copyright © Carl Farmer