Charcoal Scalycap Identification Guide

The First Impression and the Setting

The scene is an old fire site: a bonfire scar in a wood, the burnt ground where a brash heap was torched, a charcoal patch in a plantation, or the fire-swept floor under conifers. The soil is black and gritty with charcoal, sometimes greened over by pioneer mosses. Scattered through it, singly or in loose groups and occasional small clusters, are stocky little brown-capped mushrooms with a distinct shine to them when the weather is damp.

The first impression to hold onto is the contrast between a smooth, glossy, tawny cap and a dry, roughened, scaly stipe. That pairing - slick above, shaggy below - is what makes the genus recognisable before you have looked at anything else in detail.

Reading the Cap

Caps are usually two to five centimetres across, occasionally to seven. They start convex, sometimes almost hemispherical, and flatten to plano-convex with a broad low centre; the margin is incurved when young and often stays slightly downturned.

Surface texture is the character to check first. In moist conditions the cap is distinctly viscid - sticky enough to pick up grains of charcoal and fragments of moss, which then sit glued on the surface. When it dries it becomes merely tacky and takes on a varnished shine.

Colour is warm and darkest at the centre: date-brown, chestnut, tawny or orange-brown at the disc, fading outward to ochre-yellow or tan at the margin. Young caps carry small appressed fibrillose scales, strongest towards the margin, plus whitish veil fragments hanging from the very edge; rain and handling remove both, so an old cap can look almost bald.

Gills and Their Colour Sequence

The gills are attached, adnate to slightly notched, sometimes with a short decurrent tooth running onto the stipe, and moderately crowded. Follow their colour through the life of the mushroom, because that sequence places the genus: pale clay-yellow or straw in the button, then dull olive-brown, then rusty cinnamon-brown when loaded with mature spores. They never pass through pink and never become chocolate or blackish.

Under a lens the gill edge is slightly paler and finely fringed.

Stipe, Veil and Base

The stipe is three to six centimetres long and three to eight millimetres thick, more or less equal, dry, and often curved where it pushes out of uneven burnt ground. Its upper part is pale ochre-yellow and finely mealy at the very apex; from the veil line downward it is covered with recurved fibrillose scales arranged in girdles or belts, and it darkens progressively to rusty brown from the base upward as the mushroom ages.

There is no membranous skirt. Instead the partial veil leaves a fibrillose ring zone - a fuzzy band where the scaling stops and the smooth apex begins. Falling spores collect on it and stain it rust-brown, which makes it much easier to see on mature specimens than on buttons. Finding that rusty-dusted zone is a quick way to confirm a rusty-spored, veiled mushroom before you print it.

Dig rather than pull. The base is not bulbous and has no volva, but it is often bound into a plug of charcoal and soil by ochre-brown mycelial threads, and seeing that attachment to burnt soil rather than to a piece of wood matters for the identification.

Interior and Odour

Split the mushroom lengthways. The cap tissue is thin and yellowish, the stipe yellowish above and browner towards the base. There is no striking colour change on exposure, at most a slow dulling to brown. No latex. The odour is weak and indistinct, sometimes faintly earthy - nothing sharp, and certainly not the strong smells of other litter-dwelling groups.

Taking a Spore Print

Cut the stipe off flush with the gills, set the cap gill-side down on white paper - this is one case where white shows the colour better than black - cover it and leave it for two to six hours. The deposit is rusty brown to cinnamon or tobacco-brown, and once you have seen it beside a true dark-brown print from a Psathyrella or an Agaricus the difference is obvious.

That rusty print, combined with a fibrillose ring zone and a scaly stipe, is the core of the identification.

Substrate and Season

Burnt ground is effectively obligatory. Look on bonfire sites, charcoal beds, burnt soil and the charred surface of partly burnt logs and stumps - the fungus is a saprotroph living on charred organic matter and fire-modified soil, and it is one of the standard pyrophilous agarics. Sites are often productive in the first two or three seasons after burning and then stop.

The season is long, from late spring through to late autumn, with the main flush in summer and autumn after rain. Fruit bodies appear scattered, in loose troops, or in small tufts where the substrate is rich.

Separating the Look-alikes

Myxomphalia maura occupies exactly the same burnt ground and is a frequent companion. It is dark grey-brown, not tawny, with a slightly greasy rather than truly viscid cap, decurrent whitish to grey gills, no scales on the stipe, no ring zone, and a white spore deposit. The print settles it instantly.

Psathyrella pennata is another burnt-ground regular. Its cap is dry, greyish to date-brown and covered with fine pale fibrils, the stipe is brittle and snaps cleanly, and the spore deposit is dark blackish-brown.

Tephrocybe anthracophila and relatives are small, grey-brown, dry-capped, with a mealy odour and a white spore deposit.

Other Pholiota species are separated mainly by substrate. P. gummosa is pale greenish-yellow and grows on buried wood and stumps; P. spumosa and P. lenta are paler, larger and on litter or wood; the shaggy species such as P. squarrosa are much bigger, dry-capped and densely erect-scaly, and they cluster on living or dead trunks.

Gymnopilus species share the rusty spore deposit but have dry, brighter yellow to orange caps, are strongly attached to wood, especially conifer wood, and lack the sticky cap.

Hebeloma species give a duller clay-brown print, have smooth non-scaly stipes and grow on unburnt soil.

Galerina species are smaller and more slender, with smooth hygrophanous caps and no stipe scaling.

Working Checklist

Small tawny mushroom with a viscid cap; ochre margin with veil remnants; adnate gills going straw to olive to rust; dry stipe with recurved scaly girdles below a rusty fibrillose ring zone; yellowish interior; rusty-brown spore print; growing from charcoal and burnt soil rather than from clean wood.