Jelly antlers

I have friends who are mad for fungi, and look forward eagerly to the arrival of the fungus-hunting season. Personally, while I don't mind a mushroom, I prefer things with legs and wings, and I'm currently building up my strength for the quarter year snit you should expect to start as soon as the temperature dips down to invertebrate diapause level, and which won't end till the solitary bees and early bumbles start emerging in February. I expect that everyone who has to put up with me is hoping as fervently as I am for a good owling season.

Anyway, today didn't look like a promising invert day, but it did look like the kind of day when a high number of steps needed to be walked if I was going to recover from yesterday's outrageous surfeit of Sunday lunch, so I took myself off to Croome and fossicked through all the shrubberies - hoping for beetles, obviously, but confident that if nothing else I'd definitely find some fungi. In the event the only insect I managed to get a lens on was a Common Woodlouse, and the image was taken from a slightly odd angle and didn't really work. Fungus-wise things were pretty quiet too: there were the usual Jelly Ears, Candlesnuff and brackets, a few undistinguished bonnets, some of what I think was Crystal Brain, and a whole load of mushrooms that I didn't even bother with because they looked as though they could have come from the supermarket. Sadly, the handful of Wrinkled Peach I found were all young and unwrinkled, and none of them had yet started guttating. 

Luckily there was plenty of Yellow Stagshorn - in fact it seems to grow pretty much wherever in the Croome shrubberies there's a good covering of moss on an old tree stump. Even though it's very common it does have the advantage of being quite striking - though I found myself wishing I'd had a little water spray in my pocket so I could have cleaned it up a bit before taking its photo. I certainly wasn't going to try to brush the dirt off, because despite its usual common name this fungus is actually quite soft - it's "greasy and viscid" according to Pat O'Reilly's excellent First Nature page, which is useful to know, even if it does leave me feeling slightly queasy. 

As of now I will be referring to this fruiting body by its alternative common name, which is Jelly Antlers.

R: C6, 12.