Monday 3 November 2014

Brecon part 1: a cornucopia of fungi





My trip to the Brecon Beacons in Wales resulted in a cornucopia of fungi sightings. It will take a number of days to record the high-lights here, and I'm still working at identifying some of them. Other fungi were much easier to identify, such as the abundant crops of Amanita muscaria, Fly agaric in the damp, dense woodland of pines above the Talybont reservoir.
Can be confused with Amanita rubescens, the Blusher.

As the Kew.org site says, they are found  "In woodland, or beside isolated trees" and are: 

 "Ectomycorrhizal (forming a relationship with tree roots) especially with species of Betula (birch) andPinus (pine), and occasionally with other tree species."  

It is the most iconic of fungi, also used for religious, Shamansitic purposes in places such as Siberia. It contains the "toxin muscarine, which causes sweat-inducing poisoning. Also contains the alkaloids muscimol, ibotenic acid and muscazone, causing psychotropic poisoning, which may be severe in some cases, although deaths are very rare". Good to know, but I felt no temptation to eat these. Apparently one of their hallucinatory effects is the distortion of scale, which is, of course, exactly what happened to Alice, in Wonderland....
The Agaric spots can wash off in heavy rain as they seem to have done below.



Below , what I think is a wispy example of the Small Yellow Stagshorn, Calocera Viscosa. or Small Stagshorn, A tiny jelly fungus. Though this was on grass , not a rotten tree trunk, so a bit confusing.


Below, Blackening Waxcap? Hygrocybe Conica? The yellow one below, could be the same before it went black.



Below, A Common Puffball? We also saw a Fake Truffle but the picture got lost..similar to this but pale brown and spiky with yellow spores oozing out of it.


Below, Parrot WaxcapHygrocybe psittacina, green when young and later yellowish or sometimes pinkish tinged. Here you can see both stages.




Below, a ParasolMacrolepiota procer, It's got the snakeskin stipe (stem), I didn't want to damage it by digging down and finding out if it lacked the cup or sack from which the stem grew, the lack of such a sac would confirm it as a Parasol, also "The cap has attached scales in a regular pattern and a central knob that is brown at first but cracks with age revealing the white flesh." (mushroom-collecting.com). Huge examples, here on the way to the beautiful Llangattock escarpment, Mynydd Llangatwg.


 

Below , Hygrocybe miniata,Vermilion waxcap, another fungi of the genus, Hygrocybe 



Above, the view towards the \Black Mountains from the Llangattock Escarpment, Mynydd Llangatwg, below, we saw the entrance to a very large cave complex, one of the biggest in the UK. The hill is a layer cake of limestone and sandstone. The escarpments are limestone.

Below, the woods near Aber and the view from a Mountain above the Talybont Reservoir which we climbed  on Saturday, it looks towards the wreckage of a war-time plane crash.












No comments:

Post a Comment