This deadly poisonous mushroom, ubiquitous in Scotland’s spruce plantations, seems to be having a particularly good year — during a couple of hours of foraging this morning I saw hundreds of specimen in different stages of maturity.

The toxicity of this mushroom is on par with that of the death cap (Amanita phalloides), but is particularly insidious as the poison orellanine doesn’t produce any immediate symptoms on digestion, the first symptoms are flu-like, and complete kidney failure follows a couple of weeks later. This long delay and non-specific early symptoms makes diagnosis difficult, but in any case, there is no antidote, so the only effective treatment is kidney transplant.

The good news is that this mushroom is not readily confused with any edible mushrooms out there, which is, I suspect, why poisonings are quite rare. I think the only real potential for confusion is between young specimen (with still intact webbing) and young specimen of the Suillus family — which is why picking slippery jacks and such I always remove the veil to check the mushroom has pores, not gills. That said, folk have been known to confuse the deadly webcap with all sorts, from chanterelle to magic mushrooms …

With hindsight I wish I took more pictures this morning, as the one above is not the best, the way the light is reflecting of the wet cap surface makes the mushroom look slimy, which it is not, it is matte, almost velvety when dry, but I only noticed the effect on the big screen at home. But it does show the typical pattern on the stem, created by the remnants of the webbing.

There are some four hundred of species in the Cortinariaceae family in the UK (around two thousand world wide), and they are notoriously hard to identify, though identifying them to the family is fairly straightforward. Some of them display rather spectacular colours, and a fair number of species can be found in Scotland on regular basis.