What in the Woods Is That?

Play our biweekly guessing game!

Whatever draws us into the forest—be it birdwatching or logging, hiking or hunting—all of us are unified by the sense of wonder we feel in the outdoors. The forests, fields, and streams of our region are full of mystery, and if you stop and look closely, you’ll see all sorts of oddities.

Below find a picture of one such woodlands curio. Guess what it is and you’ll be eligible to win a Northern Woodlands woodpecker magnet designed by artist Liz Wahid. A prize winner will be drawn at random from all the correct entries. The correct answer, and the winner’s name, will appear when the next column is posted and in our newsletter (sign up here!).

Seeing Red

A reader found these bright red forms among the leaf litter and spring ephemerals near the Northern Woodlands office, in an east-facing cove forest of mature sugar maple and ash trees. What are these?

Answer

These are scarlet cup fungi, also called scarlet elf cups. We often find them along streams in hardwood forests with rich soil. We featured scarlet cup in our This Week in the Woods series in April 2021, writing, “This eye-catching cup species is one of the first soft-bodied fungi to emerge in spring, and as Timothy Baroni notes in Mushrooms of the Northeastern United States and Canada, scarlet cups often arrive ‘just before the morels start to appear, or at the same time.’”

This week’s contest winner was Andrea Scott