Conifer Chicken of the Woods Identification Guide

The setting and first impression

You find the Conifer Chicken of the Woods on the west side of North America, in damp coastal and montane conifer forest, and the first impression is colour. From twenty metres away a mass of bright orange shelves stands out against dark bark on the trunk of a fir, hemlock or spruce, usually one to four metres up where an old wound or broken limb let decay in. Sometimes the fruiting is on a fallen log or a standing dead snag rather than a living tree.

The second impression is scale and arrangement. This is not a single bracket. Laetiporus conifericola builds overlapping, shelving rosettes, individual caps five to thirty centimetres across, fused laterally into tiers that can span half a metre or more and weigh several kilograms. There is no stalk of any kind; the whole cluster grows straight out of the wood from a broad common attachment.

Reading the upper surface

Work over the top of one bracket carefully.

Colour. Fresh growth is a strong orange to salmon or orange-red, often deepest toward the growing margin and paler further back. As the bracket ages the colour bleaches steadily to pale orange, buff, and finally a dirty whitish, so an old specimen can look nothing like a fresh one.

Texture. Young surfaces are dry, matt and finely suede-like or slightly wrinkled to the touch. Older surfaces become smooth, then cracked and chalky.

Zoning and shape. Faint concentric zones may be visible but they are usually weak, and the surface is often uneven or bumpy rather than smoothly zoned. Caps are fan-shaped to semicircular with wavy, lobed outlines, and the margin is thick, blunt and rounded when young, thinning and becoming irregular with age.

The spore-bearing surface

Turn a bracket over or crouch beneath the cluster. The underside is poroid, and it is bright sulphur yellow to lemon yellow, a colour that contrasts sharply with the orange top and is one of the two anchoring characters of the genus.

Look closely with a lens. The pores are small and angular to nearly circular, roughly two to four per millimetre, and the tube layer beneath them is shallow, only two to five millimetres deep, running in a single layer that is continuous with the flesh above. The pore surface may run slightly down the substrate at the point of attachment. On very old brackets the yellow fades to cream or dirty white and the pore mouths become ragged, so judge colour from the freshest growth at the margin.

Flesh, section and colour change

Cut a bracket vertically through the margin with a sturdy knife. Young flesh is thick, up to two or three centimetres near the attachment, white to pale yellowish, soft and moist, and in wet weather it may weep clear or yellowish droplets from the pore surface. It is fleshy and slightly fibrous rather than corky.

Follow the same bracket into old age and the flesh becomes progressively drier, then crumbly and chalky, then brittle enough to snap and shed powder. There is no dramatic bruising: cut surfaces stay pale, sometimes discolouring slowly toward a dull yellowish or pinkish tan, and there is no blueing, reddening or blackening. The lack of a sharp bruise reaction, alongside the two-tone orange-over-yellow colour scheme, is worth recording.

Spore print

Getting a print from a bracket takes a little more setting up than from a gilled mushroom. Cut a piece of the margin with a good depth of intact tube layer, roughly a hand's width, and set it pore-surface down on white paper, propped level with a couple of matchsticks so the pores are not crushed. Cover the whole arrangement with a bowl or a large container and leave it somewhere still, at room temperature, overnight.

The print is white to very pale cream. It can be faint against white paper, so use a black card alongside, or tilt the paper into raking light to see the dust. A white print combined with a yellow pore surface and orange upper surface confirms Laetiporus; a brown or rusty print would move the collection into a different group entirely.

Substrate, season and ecology

This species is a specialist on conifers, and the host is the single most useful ecological character. It fruits on true firs (Abies), hemlock (Tsuga), Douglas fir (Pseudotsuga), spruce (Picea) and occasionally other conifers, mostly in the Pacific coastal range from Alaska south through British Columbia, Washington, Oregon and into California.

It is a brown-rot fungus. Its mycelium breaks down the cellulose in the heartwood and leaves the lignin behind, so infected trunks develop a dry, reddish-brown, cubically cracked rot that eventually crumbles into blocks. This decay is usually well advanced before the first bracket appears, and a fruiting on a living trunk indicates a substantial internal column of rot.

Fruit bodies are annual, appearing from summer into autumn and persisting on the trunk in weathered, bleached form well into winter. The same tree commonly fruits in the same spot for several consecutive years.

Separating it from look-alikes on morphology

Laetiporus sulphureus. The classic hardwood species. It grows on oak and other broadleaf trees rather than conifers, and its upper surface tends to be a more even orange-yellow with clearer concentric zoning, often with a paler yellow margin. Host tree does most of the work here: broadleaf versus conifer is the practical dividing line.

Laetiporus gilbertsonii. Another western species, but on hardwoods including oak and eucalyptus, generally with a pinker or more salmon-tinted upper surface and thinner, floppier caps.

Laetiporus huroniensis. A conifer-dwelling relative in the Great Lakes region rather than the Pacific coast, essentially separated by geography rather than by any easy field character.

Phaeolus schweinitzii. Also on conifers and also large, but grows as a rosette at the base of the trunk or from a buried root, often appearing to sit on the ground. Its upper surface is velvety and hairy, mustard-yellow to rusty brown rather than orange, and the pore surface is greenish yellow to brown and darkens strongly when handled. Its flesh is brown, not white.

Pycnoporellus fulgens and relatives. Orange brackets on conifer wood, but much smaller, thinner and tougher, with distinctly larger and more irregular pores and a fibrous rather than fleshy texture.

Hapalopilus and Aurantiporus species. Duller ochre, tan or salmon brackets without the vivid orange-over-sulphur-yellow contrast, and usually far smaller and more corky.

Old bleached specimens. These are the real trap. A weathered whitish Laetiporus can be mistaken for any number of pale brackets. Cut into the growing margin, where a trace of orange and yellow usually survives, and check the chalky flesh and shallow single tube layer.

Field checklist

Conifer host in western North America; shelving fused orange brackets with no stalk; bright sulphur-yellow pore surface with two to four small angular pores per millimetre; thick soft white flesh drying chalky; white spore print; brown cubical rot in the trunk; summer to autumn.