Hairy Bracket Identification Guide

The First Impression

You meet the Hairy Bracket on dead hardwood, usually at knee height or below: a fallen beech branch, a birch log, a willow stump, a heap of storm debris in a damp wood. The brackets grow in tiers and overlapping rows along the upper side of the wood, sometimes fusing into long ranks a metre or more in extent. From a few paces the impression is of a pale, greyish-white shelf fungus with a soft velvet look and faint concentric banding, much less colourful than the Turkeytail it grows alongside. Older brackets often go green as algae colonise the hairy upper surface, which can be misleading until you look at the fresh growing edge.

Reading the Upper Surface

Individual brackets are 3 to 10 cm wide, 2 to 6 cm deep and 3 to 10 mm thick, semicircular, fan-shaped or kidney-shaped, attached broadly and directly to the wood without a stem. They are flat or slightly humped near the attachment and thin toward the rim.

Run a thumb across the top. The surface carries a dense coat of stiff, coarse hairs, longer and shaggier than the fine velvet of most relatives, and arranged in concentric zones so the bracket looks like a series of ridged bands. Colour ranges from whitish and cream through pale grey to grey-buff and ochre, with the bands differing more in texture than in hue; a darker zone often sits just behind the margin. The extreme edge is thin, sharp and usually paler, white or cream, marking active growth. Green or grey-green tints on older parts are algal growth on the hairs, not the fungus itself.

The Pore Surface

Turn a bracket over, or crouch and look from below. There are no gills and no teeth; the spore-bearing surface is a layer of tiny pores. Fresh, they are white to cream, ageing to greyish, straw or pale buff and darkening where handled. Count them against a millimetre scale with a lens: roughly 3 to 4 per millimetre, round to slightly angular, and even across the surface, becoming somewhat torn or irregular near the margin on old specimens. The tube layer beneath the pores is thin, only 1 to 2 mm deep, and pale.

Sectioning the Flesh

Cut a bracket cleanly in half from margin to attachment with a sharp knife and look at the cut face under a lens. You should see three zones: the shaggy hair layer on top, a white to pale cream context of tough, leathery-corky flesh 1 to 5 mm thick, and the thin pale tube layer below. Many collections show a fine dark line separating the hairy tomentum from the context, visible as a thin pencil stroke in section, and it is worth checking for.

The flesh is fibrous and pliable when fresh and moist, hardening to rigid and papery when dry, then softening again after rain. It cannot be broken cleanly with a fingernail. There is no colour change on cutting, no latex, no bruising response. The smell is faintly of damp wood or is not distinctive.

Taking a Spore Print

Brackets are awkward to print but not impossible. Cut a fresh specimen from the wood with a slice of substrate attached, prop it pore-surface-down over dark paper or a glass slide on matchsticks so air can move underneath, cover it loosely and leave it overnight in a cool, humid place. The print is white. Under a microscope the spores are small, cylindrical to slightly sausage-shaped, smooth, colourless and thin-walled. In the field, a white bloom on the wood or on lower brackets in a tier is a useful sign of active sporulation.

Substrate, Season and Ecology

This is a saprotroph and occasionally a weak parasite on stressed trees, and it causes a white rot, breaking down lignin so the residual wood becomes pale, soft, fibrous and stringy. It is a hardwood specialist: beech, birch, willow, alder, hazel, oak, poplar, maple and fruit trees are all frequent hosts, and it is far less common on conifers. Look on fallen branches, cut stumps, logs left in clearings, dead standing stems and coppice stools, especially in damp, shaded, humid woodland.

Fruitbodies are annual but tough, and they persist through winter in a bleached, weathered state, so brackets are visible year-round. New growth, with a soft white margin and a clean pale pore surface, appears mainly from late spring through autumn. Groups grow in overlapping tiers, often merging laterally along a log.

Separating It from Look-alikes

Trametes versicolor, the Turkeytail, is the most frequent confusion. Its upper surface is finely velvety to almost smooth, not shaggy, and its concentric zones are strongly contrasted, often with blue, black, rust, brown or ochre bands; its brackets are thinner, more flexible and more wavy; and its pores are smaller, about 4 to 5 per millimetre. Rub the tops of both and the difference in pile is obvious.

Trametes pubescens is whitish and finely downy rather than coarsely hairy, with little or no zoning, thicker soft flesh and pores that quickly become irregular and torn. It favours birch and willow.

Trametes gibbosa is thicker and conspicuously lumpy where it meets the wood, often greenish with algae, and decisively its pores are elongated and maze-like, arranged radially rather than round.

Cerrena unicolor is very similar from above, grey and hairy with a dark line in section, but its pore surface breaks down with age into a maze of ragged, tooth-like plates, and the pore layer often takes on a greyish tone.

Bjerkandera adusta shares the thin grey brackets but has a smoke-grey to blackish pore surface and a black line in the flesh, and its margin darkens when handled.

Lenzites betulina looks identical from above, hairy and zoned, but the underside is composed of true radiating gills rather than pores, so turning it over settles it in one second.

Trichaptum species are thinner, grow mostly on conifers, and show violet to lilac tints on the pore surface, at least at the margin.

Stereum species are also hairy and zoned above but have a completely smooth, poreless underside.

Field Checklist

Thin flat bracket on dead hardwood; upper surface coarsely and stiffly hairy, zoned in whites, greys and buff, often algal-green in age; margin thin and white; pore surface white to grey with 3 to 4 round pores per millimetre; tough white leathery flesh, sometimes with a fine dark line beneath the hairs; white spore print; growing in overlapping tiers and causing a white rot.