Autumn fungi to find on evening woodland strolls

A damp October evening is the finest time of year to be in a British wood. The leaf litter smells of rain and tannin, the rides are slick with beech mast, and on every rotting stump something is quietly pushing its way out of the dark. Fungi are the woodland's great autumn event, and you need no permit, no microscope and no particular expertise to enjoy them — just a torch, a warm coat and the discipline to look rather than touch.

Why damp evenings are the best time to look

For most of the year, fungi exist as fine threads of mycelium running invisibly through soil, dead wood and leaf mould. What we call a mushroom is only the fruiting body, pushed up when conditions align: cooling soil, a decent soaking of rain, then a mild, still night. That combination arrives most reliably from late September to the end of November, and a flush can appear and collapse within three or four days.

Evening brings practical advantages. Raking torchlight across a cap shows up texture, translucency and colour that flat daylight flattens out. There are fewer people about, and the wood is quiet enough that you hear what else is moving — the rustle of a wood mouse, the sharp kee-wick of a tawny owl. Look on the sheltered side of the wood, along the edges of rides and clearings, and around the bases of birch, oak, beech, ash and elder.

Fly agaric: the storybook toadstool

You probably know this one before you have ever seen it: scarlet cap, scattered white flecks, white gills beneath and a white stem with a ragged ring and a bulbous base buried in the soil. It grows in sandy, acidic ground, most often in company with birch or pine, and it is at its best from September into November. After heavy rain the flecks wash away, so look instead for an orange-red, slightly domed cap on a clean white stem.

It is poisonous and causes delirium and vomiting — never a foraging target under any circumstances. It is also a genuinely beautiful thing at night, glowing a little under a side-lit torch. Please resist tapping or kicking it: the cap feeds slugs and insects, and the mycelium beneath is a partner to the trees around it.

Sulphur tuft: a blaze of yellow on dead wood

Sulphur tuft grows in tightly packed clumps on stumps, fallen branches and buried roots, and it is one of the most vivid sights in a winter wood. The caps are bright sulphur-yellow with a darker orange-brown centre, the gills start yellow-green and finish a dark purplish brown. It is extremely bitter and poisonous, and it is easily confused with other clustered species — which is precisely why identification from a distance is the right approach.

It fruits from late summer right through to December, often when almost everything else has finished, and it will happily colonise treated timber and old fence posts at the woodland edge. Photograph it from above, then from the side, so you capture the way the stems join at the base.

Jelly ear: rubbery and oddly familiar

Jelly ear is a rubbery, gelatinous, ear-shaped fungus, usually three to eight centimetres across, reddish-brown and translucent when fresh, darkening and shrivelling to a hard black crust in dry weather. It grows on dead wood, most classically on elder, but also on beech, sycamore and ash. You will find it all year, though autumn rain makes it plump and easy to spot. Note that its older common name is now best avoided.

Hold a torch behind one and the flesh glows amber; it is worth revisiting a dried specimen a day after rain to watch it rehydrate. While you are stooped over dead wood, keep an eye out for candlesnuff fungus with its white, smoking tips, and for the shaggy inkcap, which dissolves itself into black ink within a day.

Fieldcraft: identify and photograph from a distance

• Shoot from where you find it. Do not pick a specimen and move it somewhere with better light; you disturb the mycelium, scatter spores and ruin the find for the next person.
• Get low. Crouch down and light from the side or behind, using a second torch or a phone. Include the cap, the gills or pores, and the very base of the stem — that is what identification actually depends on.
• Use a stick to part leaf litter rather than your fingers, and never bring hands near your face afterwards.
• Wash your hands when you get home, and keep dogs and small children from putting anything in their mouths.
• Never eat a wild fungus. There is no taste test, no smell test and no old wives' rule that makes it safe. Some of the most dangerous species in Britain closely resemble harmless ones.
• Get the landowner's permission before picking anything, anywhere, and check local reserve rules — many sites and SSSIs prohibit it entirely.
• If you roll a log to look underneath, roll it back. Leave the wood, the litter and the mycelium as you found them.

What else is moving after dark

Early autumn is still bat weather. Pipistrelles and noctules hunt along rides and over woodland ponds before finding somewhere to hibernate, and a cheap detector will pick up their echolocation clicks. Tawny owls call through the night, and young birds dispersing from their parents are especially noisy in October. Fallow and red deer are rutting, so listen for groans and clashes of antlers.

Closer to your feet, wood mice and bank voles rustle through the leaf litter, hedgehogs shuffle along hedgerows, and foxes and badgers use the same paths you do. Slugs and snails are everywhere after rain, doing the tidying up that fungi began.

Use a red filter on your torch where you can — it preserves your night vision and disturbs wildlife far less — keep the beam low, and move slowly. Stand still for a full minute and let the wood forget you are there. Then walk home, make a note of what you saw, and come back after the next rain. The best finds are usually within fifty metres of the car park.