<Good to hear someone else uses sumac MB, they are the red flowered ones here. Cindi, the polypore in the pic is called tinder polypore, its hoof sized at maturity. The larger shelf polypores you mention are resinous polypore, and conifer base polypore, they grow to dinner plate size and are often used to paint or draw on. At least the ones we found here were. My guide book says the tinder pp habitat is dead conifers, or live maple, birch, beech, hickery, polar, and cherry.>
Steve, now that is great information. I gather them all the time like I said for writing on. I have not saved the ones that didn't turn out too good, too bad that I didn't.
I have given several of the "shelf polypores" to my daughters when they were very young that I had drawn pictures on. To this day the pictures are still entirely visible. That would be say, 25 or more years ago. The shelf polypores that I drew for them were very large, perhaps the size of dinnerplates.
It is nice to know the actual name of the fungus. I always wondered what they were called, and now I do.
I am going to gather the Sumac cones soon, I will dry them and add them to my smoker collection, that will be burlap, polypores and Sumac cones. This will be good smoke for the bees. But as I said before, I am going to attempt working the hives without smoke this year and see what comes of it. I will not be stupid and not have the smoker at hand, but I won't puff it if I don't have to.
There are alot of very edible mushrooms in our area. I am not familiar enough with the mushroom kingdom to feel comfortable in gathering, but I know in the fall there are shrooms aplenty.
We used to have horses here years ago and we always had in plenty those darn psyllisybum (spelling) Stuntz' mushrooms. Evidently they are not as halucinogenic as the liberty caps, but I have read they still contain the chemical they both possess. From my youth memories I can identify the magic mushrooms. I often wondered if the horses got high from grazing around these little fungi. Probably not, never saw any crazy acting horses out there. Oh well.
This is a picture of a polyspore, now whether it is a small shelf polypore or a timber polypore, that is left to the unknown. It is about the size of a fist, it was one that I had kept because my neice drew a pretty picture on it and I liked it. The pic is a little blurry, it is looking at it from the side.
Great day. Cindi