Craterellus lutescens Identification Guide

The Setting and the First Glance

Craterellus lutescens is a fungus you find with your knees on the ground. It grows in damp, mossy conifer woodland, usually spruce or pine, and shows a marked preference for calcareous or at least base-rich ground, often in wet hollows, along mossy ditch edges and among sphagnum on the margins of flushes. It fruits in troops, sometimes in the hundreds, so once you find one you should stop and look properly, because the rest of the colony will be within a few metres. The trouble is that from above the caps are dull brown and half-buried in moss, which makes the species genuinely hard to see. The trick is to look for the stipes rather than the caps: kneel down, get your eye near ground level, and scan sideways through the moss. What appears is a scatter of bright egg-yellow to orange stalks, glowing against the green, each carrying a small brown funnel. That contrast between a drab cap and a vivid stipe is the first and most memorable impression.

Reading the Cap

The cap is small, 2 to 6 centimetres across, and thin-fleshed. It begins convex with an inrolled margin, then becomes flat, then depressed, and finally develops a true funnel shape with a central hollow that runs down and connects with the hollow interior of the stipe. In old specimens the centre is often perforated straight through, so that a stalk of grass can be threaded up the middle. The margin is thin, wavy and irregularly lobed and stays downturned for a long time. The upper surface is dry and finely fibrillose to minutely scaly, with the fibrils radiating outwards and darkening in the centre, giving a slightly shaggy or streaky look under a lens. Colour is yellow-brown, ochre-brown or greyish-brown, often warmer and more orange-tinted at the margin than the centre, and it darkens noticeably when wet.

Reading the Spore-Bearing Surface

This is where you make or break the identification, so turn the fungus over and look closely with a hand lens. The underside is not gilled. It is a nearly smooth, faintly wrinkled surface, decurrent onto the stipe, bearing only low, blunt, irregular veins and folds that fork and anastomose into shallow networks. In good material these folds are so shallow that the surface reads as almost even. The colour is a warm apricot to orange-yellow or pinkish-yellow, sometimes with a faint greyish or lilac bloom developing on mature specimens as spores mature. Compare that mentally with a true gilled fungus, where the blades are thin, deep, sharp-edged and clearly separate, and with the more strongly ridged relatives described below.

Stipe, Base and Flesh

The stipe is 3 to 8 centimetres long and only 3 to 10 millimetres thick, tapering downwards, often curved or compressed and grooved along its length, and it is hollow throughout, connecting with the cap cavity. Colour is the diagnostic feature: a clean, bright egg-yellow to chrome-yellow or orange-yellow, brightest in the lower half, and never grey or brownish. The surface is smooth and slightly waxy in feel. The base is simply narrowed, without a bulb, ring or volva, and is usually bound into moss by fine whitish mycelial threads. Pull one out gently and you will often lift a small cushion of moss with it.

The flesh is thin, elastic and pale yellowish, tough rather than brittle, and it does not change colour when cut. There is no milk, no latex and no bruising reaction, though damaged parts dry darker. The smell is pleasant and faintly aromatic, sometimes described as fruity, and it is stronger in a full basket than in a single specimen.

Taking a Spore Print

Setting a print from a thin funnel-shaped fungus takes a little arranging. Choose two or three mature specimens, trim the stipes short, and lay the caps on their sides on black paper with the fertile surface facing the sheet, propping them with a rolled paper wedge so the surface sits a couple of millimetres clear. Cover the whole arrangement with a bowl and leave it overnight. The deposit is white to pale cream, occasionally with a faint yellowish or pinkish tint, and it is sparse compared with a gilled fungus, which is why black paper and several caps help. Microscopically the spores are smooth, broadly ellipsoid and rather large, roughly 9 to 12 by 6 to 8 micrometres, with no amyloid reaction.

Substrate and Season

This species is ectomycorrhizal with conifers, principally spruce and pine, and it grows from soil through moss and needle litter rather than from wood. It favours damp, humid, mossy ground and often occurs on base-rich or calcareous soils, though it tolerates a range. Fruiting begins in late summer and continues well into late autumn, often persisting after the first light frosts, and it can be one of the last species still appearing in a conifer wood in November. Colonies return to the same patches of moss for many years.

Separating the Closest Look-alikes

Craterellus tubaeformis is the species most often confused with it and grows in the same kind of woodland. Its cap is greyish-brown to dull brown, but the decisive difference is the underside: it bears distinctly raised, thick, blunt, gill-like decurrent folds that fork repeatedly and are clearly three-dimensional, coloured greyish to yellowish-grey rather than apricot. Its stipe is also duller, yellowish-grey to pale ochre, not bright egg-yellow, and it more often grows on very acid soils and among rotting conifer debris.

Cantharellus cibarius is altogether fleshier and firmer, uniformly egg-yellow above and below, with a solid stipe rather than a hollow one, and thick blunt forking ridges. It never develops the perforated funnel of Craterellus lutescens.

Craterellus cornucopioides and C. cinereus are dark grey to blackish-brown throughout, with grey stipes and grey to blackish fertile surfaces, so the bright yellow stipe rules them out at once.

Hygrophoropsis aurantiaca can look similar in colour from above, but it has true gills: thin, crowded, sharp-edged, repeatedly forked orange blades. It also grows on conifer debris, woodchip and needle mats rather than in wet moss, and its stipe is not hollow in the same continuous way.

Omphalotus and Lentinellus species have proper gills and grow on wood, and small brown Omphalina and Rickenella species in moss have thin true gills and much smaller, more delicate stipes.

Field Checklist

• Small funnel-shaped brown cap, often perforated at the centre
• Wavy, lobed, downturned margin
• Nearly smooth to shallowly wrinkled apricot underside, not true gills
• Hollow, compressed, bright egg-yellow to orange stipe
• Thin elastic yellowish flesh with no colour change
• White to cream spore print
• Troops in wet moss under spruce and pine, late summer to late autumn