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