Winter Mushrooming in the Alder Swamp I: Datroniella scutellata (Datronia scutellata)

[N.B. since I wrote this post Datronia scutellata has been moved to the genus Datroniella - see below for reference]

Some Datronia scutellata are prettier than others.

I live in central Ontario. Despite this being one of the meanest snow-and-ice-covered winters we’ve had in years, that hasn’t stopped me from going out mushrooming. While the dog snuffles through deep snow following deer and rabbit tracks, I’ve been peeling and carving and breaking all manner of fungi off dead trees and branches. 

An advantage of the consistent below-freezing temperatures is that it's given me easy access to an area I would normally need hip-waders to explore—the  wetland at the bottom of our property. There's a little creek down there and an ancient leaking beaver dam, a few dogwoods, a few black ash, but mostly a preponderance of alders, none of which I'd ever looked closely at before. But I've been scouring this little ecosystem for weeks and I've been coming up with all kinds of entertaining finds.

One of the first was a ladder of exquisite little polypores, none bigger than my thumbnail. At first I thought they were Perenniporia ohiensis, a diminutive shelf fungus that that looks like an elf's version of Fomes fomentarius, but has thick-walled pores. The little guys I'd found growing on a dead alder were not, however, hoof-shaped, nor did they have those characteristic well-spaced Perenniporia pores. Which made mine Datronia scutellata.    

When growing on horizontal branches, Datronia scutellata can be almost cap-free.

Since then I've found them on six other dead alder branches or dead. I may have to invest in some hip-waders to see what they look like during the growing season.

Datronia scutellata, a diminutive polypore, rarely measures more than 2 cm across.

References

Li, H.J., Cui, B.K., Dai, Y.C.Taxonomy and multi-gene phylogeny of Datronia (Polyporales, Basidiomycota), Persoonia. 2014 Jun; 32: 170–182.