It wasn't what I was looking for. I was after a photo of a Northern Flicker. But— as I carefully crept along beneath the trees to get close enough for a photo, a flash of a different orange caught my eye.
Nestled in the hollow core of a very old fir stump was a beautiful fan of orange and yellow mushroom. Turns out it is known as a ‘Conifer Chicken of the Woods’ (Laetiporus conifericola). I’ve seen it before growing on trunks of decaying fir trees, sometimes quite spectacularly, but the appeal of this sighting was accented by its cozy home low down, inside the empty round of the stump.
If I’d not been pursuing the Flicker, I may well have missed this beauty! I didn’t get the Flicker. He was long gone by the time I’d finished photographing the ‘Chicken of the Woods’.
(Note: The inside of the stump was in shadow in the morning, so I returned later in the day when the sun was higher to get the photo above.)
