Dripping Bonnet Identification Guide

The First Impression and Where You Are Standing

You do not find Dripping Bonnet by scanning at eye level. You find it by kneeling. The setting is damp, shaded woodland or a wet hedge bottom, and the substrate is small dead plant material lying on the ground: fallen twigs, bramble stems, dead bracken and fern stalks, conifer needles, grass bases, rotting stems in a ditch. Get your eye within thirty centimetres of the litter after a wet autumn week and you begin to see them, a scattering of minute pale bonnets on wire-thin stalks, each no more than a centimetre across and two to four centimetres tall.

The character that makes this species memorable, and which is unmistakable once seen, is the stalk. It is sheathed in a thick, transparent, glassy layer of slime, so heavy that it distorts the outline of the stem, catches the light like a bead of resin, and often gathers into a hanging drop at the base. A hand lens turned on a fresh specimen shows what looks like a thin wire suspended inside a tube of clear jelly. Touch one with a fingertip and the slime strings out. Nothing else of this size and shape carries such a conspicuously glutinous stipe under a dry cap.

Reading the Cap

The cap is three to fifteen millimetres across, at first a tiny hemisphere or a narrow bell, expanding to convex and eventually to nearly flat or shallowly umbilicate with age. The colour is pale: whitish, ivory, pale cream, or greyish-buff, usually a shade darker and browner over the centre and paling to almost white at the margin.

Two surface characters matter. First, the cap is dry, or at most faintly moist, and is finely pruinose, dusted as though with the finest flour, especially when young. This is the crucial contrast with the drenched stipe: dry cap, glutinous stem. Second, the cap is translucent-striate. Hold a fresh specimen up against the light and you see the gills showing through the thin flesh as dark radial lines running from the margin most of the way to the centre. The margin itself is often slightly scalloped or crenate where those striations end.

The Gills

Turn a cap over. The gills are white to very pale grey, few in number, thick for the size of the mushroom, widely spaced, and with a distinctly waxy or slightly rubbery look. Count them: a mature cap typically carries somewhere between about ten and eighteen gills reaching the stem, with a few shorter ones between. That low count and wide spacing is a real character; a crowded, many-gilled underside points elsewhere.

Attachment is adnate to shortly decurrent, the gills running onto the top of the stalk and sometimes descending it a little way as fine lines. The gill edges are even and concolorous, not darkly marginate.

The Stipe, the Base and the Flesh

Underneath the slime the stem itself is one to two millimetres thick, cylindrical, equal, hollow, brittle, and whitish to pale greyish-brown, often darkening slightly towards the base. It is smooth beneath its glutinous jacket. The gluten is a separate layer that can be wiped away, leaving a surprisingly slim and ordinary stalk behind, and it is thickest in fresh young material, thinning or drying to a shiny varnish in old specimens or in dry weather.

The base sits directly on the twig or stem, sometimes with a small pad of white mycelium or a few fine white fibrils, but there is no bulb, no volva, no ring, and no rooting tap root. Flesh throughout is thin, watery-white, insubstantial and unchanging: it does not bruise blue, red or black, and it releases no latex when broken. Odour is negligible or very faintly earthy.

Taking and Reading a Spore Print

With a cap this small, technique matters. Cut two or three caps free at the very top of the stem, taking care not to smear the slime onto the fertile surface, and place them gills-down on a strip of glass or on black card. Cover with a small jar to keep the humidity up and leave overnight in a cool place. Because the caps are tiny, the deposit will be faint, so do not expect a bold disc; you are looking for a ghostly white bloom in the shape of the gills.

The print is white. Under a microscope the spores are smooth, colourless, narrowly ellipsoid to almost cylindrical, roughly eight to eleven by four to five micrometres, and amyloid: a drop of Melzer's iodine turns them grey-blue to blackish. That amyloid reaction places the species firmly in the Mycena group of genera.

Substrate, Season and Ecology

This is a litter and twig decomposer, not a wood-rotting bracket and not a mycorrhizal partner. Look for it on small-diameter dead material lying in shade and holding moisture: fallen sticks of a finger's thickness or less, dead bramble and rose stems, bracken rachides, conifer needle beds, dead grass and sedge bases, and mossy fallen branches. Damp, sheltered, undisturbed woodland and old hedge banks are the places to invest your time. It usually fruits gregariously, sometimes in troops of dozens along a single fallen stem.

The season runs from late summer through autumn into early winter, peaking in the wet weeks of October and November in temperate regions, and fruiting is closely tied to rainfall; a dry fortnight shuts it down completely.

Separating It From Its Look-alikes on Morphology

Mycena epipterygia is the species most often confused. It also has a slimy stem, but there the resemblance ends: its cap is likewise viscid, with a separable elastic pellicle that can be peeled off in one piece with tweezers, its colours are yellower, with a distinctly yellow or lemon stalk, and it is generally larger, with a cap up to two centimetres. Dripping Bonnet has a dry, pruinose, whitish cap with no peelable skin and no yellow tones.

Mycena vulgaris shares a glutinous stem but again has a viscid cap, and that cap is a much darker grey-brown to blackish-brown with a paler margin. It is also a specialist of conifer needle beds. Colour and cap texture separate them straight away.

Mycena filopes, Mycena polygramma and the other slender grey bonnets have completely dry, non-glutinous stalks. Wipe the stem with a fingertip: if nothing strings, look elsewhere in the genus.

Hemimycena species are white and small but have dry stalks, more crowded gills and non-amyloid spores. Marasmius species on the same twigs are tougher and more pliant, and never carry a slimy stalk.

Finally, the small pale Galerina and Tubaria species on the same litter have brown spore prints and brownish gills. A white print rules them out at once.

A Working Field Sequence

Kneel and search wet twig litter. Confirm a cap under fifteen millimetres, whitish, dry, pruinose and translucent-striate. Check for widely spaced, thick, whitish gills, adnate to shortly decurrent. Touch the stem and confirm a heavy transparent slime sheath. Look for the absence of ring, volva and bulb. Take an overnight print on glass or black card and confirm it is white.