The spooky season has a way of arriving overnight: one day candy corn suddenly appears on the grocery shelf, the next day shelves of candy corn pop up along the Beech Forest Trail. The yellow and orange brackets are the fruit bodies of Laetiporus sulphureus, the sulfur shelf mushroom, that can appear on dead and dying trees in the late summer and fall. These are known as chicken of the woods, not to be confused with hen of the woods or maitake mushrooms. The pumpkin-size mound pictured here is growing on a rotten collar of a sizable oak, one of the sulfur shelf’s favored genera. The fungus decomposes the cellulose of the tree but not its lignin — the compound found in cell walls — a preference that, over time, leaves the host tree carefully carved into neat cubes of wood. —Joe Beuerlein
