Yellow legged fungi - Craterellus tubaeformis

Hello weekend and hello #FungiFriday community!

Today I stumbled across a shocking discovery! The news are not 100% confirmed yet, so I try my best to hold my cool, but I’m just a little too excited for this you guys 😂

I’ve been on a few forest walks these past couple weeks, walking for miles in search of mushrooms to eat, as well as mushrooms to photograph for this community. Also just to detach from my daily activities and give my eyes a break from the screens I am so addicted to.

My last trip ended with just a few edibles to fry and put on my sandwich that evening. It was delicious, granted, but a small part of me wished I would find a few more to enjoy.

Nonetheless, I came back with a bunch of photos for my articles to keep you all entertained for good few weeks. This week while at my work break, I randomly picked up the subject for my next post and decided to call it a ‘yellow legged mushrooms’.

I mean, look at them - how else would you call these? That’s exactly what I entered in google in attempt to try and identify this ‘common’ mushroom that I’ve seen around every season, growing in masses around the area where I usually look for known edible mushrooms 😂

And when I say masses… this is what I mean! So many of them that the whole forest floor lights up from their bright yellow/orange legs!

Usually I walk straight past them. I smile to them of course, cause they bring a smile to my face with their cheerful yellow legs. Yellow and juicy green have this effect on me. So I smile and thank them for making me smile and I carry on walking in search of edible mushrooms.

I love bright colours, but in nature bright colours often happen as a warning. A lot of brightly coloured plants are not edible or striaght toxic. The other bright coloured fungi that comes to mind is a coral mushroom. I love seeing them around, but know better not to eat them 😉

They’ve only just started showing their pretty selves around and no doubt I’ll be writing about them again, once I collect more pictures, but today is not their time!

This week’s subject was picked purely for the bright appearance and a sheer amount of pictures that I took of them last week.

They’re such an adorable models!

If you’ve read any of my other mushrooms posts, you’ll know I’m a little lazy writer. I’ll give you a name of the mushroom if I know it for sure, while those I don’t know, I just describe by the features I see and rarely go an extra mile to identify them.

Today however I thought it should be easy enough to type ‘yellow legged mushroom’ in google and guess what I found?!!

Source

Well… according to Wikipedia, I’ve been walking around possibly edible fungi, while looking for something to eat 😂😂😂

What I’ve learned again (sometimes repetition is well needed) is that while ignorance might be a bliss that I sometimes long for so much, it can also make you hungry, while you walk around food, not knowing it’s food 😂

And while I’m not 💯 % sure that what we’re looking at is indeed a winter chanterelle or otherwise know as trumpet mushroom or yellow legged chanterelle, I have a reasonable amount of proofs that it sure CAN be.

Uppss… not this one below ⬇️ though! That is another type of fungi that grew amongst the yellow legged ones that somehow found its sneary way into this article 😉

I visited a few more of the google results for my search wild food uk amongst the others and there is a video at the bottom which helps to identify it.

I’ll have to go back to this patch another day and look for more features to identify it. I’ll have to pick one up to check if the gills (or pseudogills in this case) look very irregular, just like the ones underneath the real chanterelles.

I will also be observing that yellow leg much closer and see if it splits into what looks like 2 leggs according to the video I found on wild food uk.

Provided that these 2 features check in, I might just come back with a bag full of edibles from my next trip to the forest! I will be laughing hard at myself if these indeed tunr out to be winter chanterelles 😂

But hey - if any of you know what the winter chanterelles look like and can shed some light on a probability that these are what I think they are, I’ll be forever gratefull for your insight!

@ewkaw do you know these?