Crowded Parchment Identification Guide

The First Impression

The find usually happens on a dull walk through hardwood woodland, most often oak. A branch has come down, or a dead limb is still attached low on a trunk, and along a metre or more of it there is a continuous frill of small orange-tan fans, so tightly packed and overlapping that they read as a single crinkled ribbon rather than as individual mushrooms. From a distance the effect is of paint that has dried on the bark and then curled up along its edges.

Touch it. The whole thing is dry, thin and stiff, like painted parchment or leather, with no softness or sponginess anywhere. That texture, plus the sheer crowding, is what the common name records, and it is your first strong clue.

Reading the Fruitbody

This is a crust fungus that has decided to build small brackets. Technically it is effused-reflexed: it starts as a flat sheet welded to the bark, then the upper edge of that sheet peels outwards and upwards into a narrow cap. Look for the flat crust component behind and below the fans, because seeing both phases on the same branch is highly diagnostic.

The individual fans are small, generally 0.5 to 2 cm wide and projecting only 0.3 to 1 cm from the wood. They are semicircular to shell-shaped with a wavy or shallowly lobed margin, and they fuse sideways with their neighbours into long undulating rows. In section the flesh is barely half a millimetre thick.

The Upper Surface

Use a hand lens. When fresh the upper surface is finely tomentose, a short velvety felt that flattens and wears away with age until old specimens are smooth and matted. Concentric zoning is present but restrained, a series of soft bands in buff, ochre, cinnamon and tawny orange rather than sharp contrasting stripes. The growing margin is paler, cream to yellowish or almost white, and is the best place to judge fresh colour.

Weathered material misleads people constantly. Season-old fans go grey, collect algae, and turn green. If you want to identify with confidence, find the actively growing edge of the colony.

The Spore-bearing Surface

Turn a fan over, or bend the branch so you can see underneath. There are no pores, no gills and no teeth. The fertile surface is smooth and even, sometimes very slightly bumpy or wrinkled where it has grown over an irregularity in the bark. Fresh it is bright orange-buff to apricot; dried it fades to pale tan or dull ochre.

That smoothness is the most important structural observation you will make. It places the specimen among the parchment fungi and instantly excludes every polypore, which is the group most beginners reach for when they see small woody brackets.

The Scratch Test

Several close relatives release a red juice when their fresh fertile surface is scratched. Take a moist, actively growing specimen and draw a fingernail or a blunt point firmly across the underside, then wait half a minute. In this species nothing appears. A clean negative on a genuinely fresh, damp specimen is a real character, not an absence of evidence, and it is the quickest way to eliminate the bleeding parchment fungi.

Flesh and Section

Slice a fan vertically with a razor blade and look at the cut with a lens. The flesh is tan, uniformly coloured, tough and fibrous, and it does not show a conspicuous dark separating line between the tomentum above and the fertile layer below. Dried material becomes hard and slightly brittle but rehydrates within minutes of a shower, resuming its original colour and flexibility. This ability to revive is why colonies persist and look fresh at odd times of year.

Taking a Spore Print

Printing a thin bracket is fiddly but possible. Cut a section of branch carrying actively growing fans, arrange it so the fertile undersides face down over a piece of dark glass or foil with a few millimetres of clearance, and enclose the whole thing in a box with a damp tissue overnight. The deposit is white and often sparse. Under the microscope the spores are smooth, colourless, narrowly cylindrical to slightly curved, about 5 to 7 by 2 to 2.5 micrometres, and they stain blue-grey in iodine, a reaction that confirms the genus.

Substrate, Season and Ecology

The substrate is remarkably consistent: dead branches of hardwoods, above all oak, both fallen limbs on the ground and dead branchlets still held in the canopy. Hickory, maple and beech also serve. Conifers are unusual hosts.

The fungus causes a white rot of the branch wood, breaking down lignin and leaving a bleached, fibrous residue. Much of the colonisation happens while the branch is still attached and shaded out, so fruiting often begins the season after the limb dies and continues as the branch lies on the woodland floor. Fruitbodies can be found in every month, drying out in summer and reviving after autumn and winter rain, which makes this one of the few reliable finds in a bare January wood.

Separating the Look-alikes on Morphology

The False Turkey-tail, Stereum ostrea, shares the smooth underside but its fans are far larger, 2 to 7 cm, boldly zoned in contrasting bands, and they grow as discrete overlapping shelves rather than as a crowded continuous ribbon; they are also usually narrowed to a distinct attachment point.

Stereum hirsutum is bigger and coarser, with a conspicuously hairy upper surface and a brighter yellow to orange fertile face, and its brackets are less densely fused.

The bleeding species, Stereum gausapatum on oak and Stereum sanguinolentum on conifer, answer the scratch test with red.

Turkeytail and its polypore allies show a layer of tiny pores under a lens, which settles the matter immediately.

Split Gill, Schizophyllum commune, is white to grey, densely hairy above, and its underside is made of longitudinally split, folded false gills.

Trichaptum biforme carries a violet-tinted pore surface that breaks up into teeth with age.

Working Checklist

• Dozens to hundreds of tiny fans, 0.5 to 2 cm, crowded and fused along a branch
• Thin, dry, leathery, parchment-like texture
• Upper surface finely velvety, softly zoned in buff to tawny orange, paler at the margin
• Underside smooth, orange-buff, with no pores, gills or teeth
• No red juice when the fresh fertile surface is scratched
• Hardwood branches, especially oak; found year round