TreeCall: Chicken of the woods

Don’t count your Chickens of the woods before they grow, and don’t ignore them when they don’t show.

The large, fresh yellow, annual fruitbodies of Laetiporus sulphureus are known as ‘Chicken of the woods’. They grow from May to autumn and are found on many broadleaved trees, but especially oak, in UK. I suppose the name arises from people wandering through woods and spotting a yellow lump in a branch fork, seemingly with wings. ‘Look! There’s a chicken’ they wound presumably cry.

You can often find them growing out of old wounds on the trunk or main branches of a tree, but they can grow near the ground too. I’ve seen a bright yellow one on a plum stump and an old, white one at the base of a wild cherry. The overlapping, fleshy fans can reach up to around 1m across but they do get eaten so older ones may look a bit dog-eared.

The bright yellow colour fades over the growing season and the fungus looks white and chalky when it is old. The disease can be in a tree for decades and the fruitbodies don’t appear every year, which is typical of the unhelpfulness of fungi.

The fungus causes a brown rot in the wood of a tree by eating the pale cellulose and leaving the darker lignin. Eventually the wood degenerates into brown or reddish cubes and often you can see a white mycelium, like a skin connecting them.

The disease can be a health and safety issue if the tree is close to lots of people as it is difficult for the tree to adapt to the loss of cellulose, which provides the flexibility of the wood. Trunk or branch can, then, become brittle and weak. So, if you see this fungus on a tree but then it doesn’t appear the next year that doesn’t mean it has gone away. It’s still there, munching on the cellulose – you’ll see it again sometime.

This can be a spectacular fungus and, when young, it is supposed to be edible, though I haven’t tried it myself.