Here are some interesting polypores for this #mushroommonday
This is a first for me, Phlebia incarnata. At first I thought it was another variant of turkey tail but it was much more spongy and solid pink on the top. It was growing amongst false turkey tail so I figured it might just be a pink fungi growing on the stereum ostrea. As it turns out this is just its own unique fungi, sadly it has no medicinal properties but the pink is pretty cool to find out in the forest.
Here is another unique polypore called Ischnoderma resinosum aka resinous polypore. They have somewhat of an iridescent shine to them with deep red and blue hues at different angles. I just learned that these technically can be cooked and eaten if you find a really young specimen. The best way to cook these is to boil them in a reduced soup, or to pickle them.
Another unique polypore is Polyporus badius. This is a very thin and large polypore that has really dark blue/black at the center then gets nice warmish red tones out near the edges.
When you flip them over they have very tiny smooth pores underneath. So far there is no culinary or medicinal use known for these.
Here are a couple of young birch polypores. Their Latin name is Piptoporus betulinus and they are a good medicinal mushrooms where you can cook and eat very young specimens or take the older dried ones and make alcohol or tea tinctures out of them to get their antiviral and anticancer compounds. They have the same medicinal properties as chaga.
Here is some Stereum hirsutum also known as Hairy Curtain Crust. Other than its bright orange color there are no known uses for this fungi medicinal or culinary. I would imagine you could use various extraction methods to get the orange color for use in a fabric dye.
I discovered a dead log with all sorts of polypores on it. There are some Daldinia concentrica at the lower right, the dark ball structures. The larger white disc shapes are some species of ganoderma, I'm guessing they are probably Ganoderma applanatum. Towards the back it looks like there might be some red belted conk's as well as some birch polypore at the very top. This log probably sprouts all different sorts of species throughout the year.
I also found a golden coral known as Ramaria Aurea. This is an edible species, at this young age the golden color makes it easy to identify but as they get older these edible golden coral can be confused with the inedible ramaria formosa which causes stomach upset. Even when cooking golden coral you have to blanch it first (partially boil it) then discard the water and cook it again to remove any potential toxins that might cause stomach upset.
That's all for now, hopefully I can keep finding more mushrooms this year. Thanks for looking :-)