A mushroom a minute on village fungus foray

What do you do while walking the dogs? One answer is to look up and try to identify the birds. Well, I tried that but once you have sorted out the easy ones the rest are just LBJs (little brown jobs)! So now I look down on the floor and have discovered the fascinating world of fungi!

There were so many different species, I struggled to identify them. Then along came the opportunity to go on a guided walk with Tony Leech, the county fungus recorder, who taught me the only way to be really sure of the species is to look not only at the topside of the fungi but also at the underside, especially the gills or tubes and the stipe (stem). Other aids to identification are smell, taste and colour of the spores which can be critical.