Chicken of the woods

 

Chicken of the woods Laetiporus sulphureus, growing on a decaying oak trunk in Backstone bank wood in Weardale’s Tunstall valley. This is the third crop of these spectacular toadstools that has erupted from this tree in recent years. Their webs of fungal hyphae are slowly hollowing out the oak’s trunk, turning it into something with the texture of a crumbly biscuit.

Woodland fungi are a furtive bunch, living mostly unseen under the soil or inside other organisms, digesting whatever their creeping threads can find: nature’s recyclers. Their public appearances are often fleeting, limited to a dusting of rust spores on the underside of a yellowing leaf or overnight eruptions of toadstools in autumn. But bracket fungi are a class apart: big, durable and sometimes a little sinister, and none more so than Laetiporus sulphureus.

Gastronomes relish chicken of the woods as a delicacy, comparable in texture to well-cooked chicken breast, with a rich fungal aroma. So do insects: these are fine young specimens but soon they’ll undoubtedly be full of maggots. Once the dinner-plate-sized brackets were past their best they become chewy and tough, having lost the plump fleshiness of youth.

Six years ago, I picked up a mature fallen chicken of the woods bracket and took it home, to see what might hatch out. Nothing for four days, but on the fifth a blizzard of minute flies swirled out when I lifted the lid of the container. Then, on the 10th day, something special.

It was, I think, a cork moth, Nemapogon cloacella, just 5mm long, scuttling across the surface of the decaying fungus. At first it seemed just another dull, brown micro-moth, but a magnifying glass revealed fringed, upswept wings clothed in scales of mottled brown, white and gold; an insect of exquisite beauty.

Heartwood of oak, created by a sapling’s sunlit leaves perhaps two centuries ago, broken down, molecule by molecule, reconstituted into fungal tissue, then reincarnated yet again as a tiny jewel of an insect.