Little Red Mushroom with Yellow Gills
I just downloaded some old pictures from my cellphone, and among them were these pictures of a bright red mushroom from August 27, 2023. I left the acorn in the picture for a sense of scale (everyone knows how big an acorn is, right?)
Flipping it over, we can see that the gills on the underside are a bright canary yellow, so this is a very colorful little fungus all around.
The bright coloration is distinctive enough that I am reasonably sure that this is Hygrocybe_cuspidata, the “Candy Apple Waxy Cap”. One site mentioned that they tended to grow under oak trees, and since this one is right next to an acorn, it is clearly under an oak, so that’s all right.
When I see something this brightly colored, my first reflex is to think, “Whoa, I bet that’s toxic!” But, looking up this species on several different sites, nobody wants to commit themselves on whether it is toxic or not. I rather suspect that this is because mushroom hunters in general have the same reflex as me, and so nobody is quite willing to take a chance. Especially since some mushrooms (like, say, the infamous Destroying_angel) are not just fatally toxic, but the death is lingering, agonizing, and fundamentally unstoppable. So this goes into the bin, “Can’t confirm if it is toxic, but why chance it?”
There is apparently a fair amount of disagreement over the taxonomy. There are several species in the genus Hygrocybe, but it is unclear how the specific species in the genus should be divided. Wikipedia says that there are some edible mushrooms in this genus, but (a) the edible species are in Europe, Southeast Asia, and Central America, not here, and (b) it’s not like I’m starving. I don’t have to play Russian Roulette with fungi I find growing in the woods to survive. So, I will leave these bright red specimens to their own devices.