Another mushroom walk in a different wood

The weather was poor but somehow we both felt like going out for a walk. The week had been busy and we needed some fresh air. So we drove to a different local wood where OH, on a previous photography excursion, had spotted quite a few mushrooms.

This is what we found this time:

Yellow Stagshorn, Calocera viscosa (Klebriger Hoernling), very pretty. Apparently, you can eat it but it's a bit chewy and there isn't much to it. It looks good as garnish.

This is a razorstrop fungus, Piptoporus betulinus, also called birch polypore. The woodland had huge amounts of those. They are apparently edible but quite bitter. They're used dried by bushcraft folk as a way of lighting a fire if all other kindling is wet, of sharpening one's blade and, and this interests me in particular because I always come away from our outings with minor scratches and scrapes that still bleed annoyingly: if you cut a strip away from the amazingly white, clean-looking underside and press that on the wound, it'll act as a styptic, stanching the bleeding and soaking up any blood. I read on a bushcraft forum how one of the survivalists had cut himself on his knife hours away from the nearest hospital. He used a couple of strips of birch polypore which promptly fused with the wound upon healing. Oetzi, the Tyrolean prehistoric Ice Man, apparently had bits of this mushroom with him in a pouch.

I also found a few very small examples of Suillus under pine trees -- these are edible but weren't really worth it as they became squidgy very quickly. Nothing like the huge specimens I found in Bavaria last month.

One possible reason for the relative dearth of boletes in a wood like this that would normally be predestined to have loads of them sprouting up in this weather is the competition arising from many other fellow mushroom-hunting Continentals, mostly from highly knowledgeable Eastern Europeans. When I was stalking through the undergrowth, I bumped into a Russian-speaking family, complete with grandmother who was the obvious authority. I'd have loved to tag along -- "Teach me everything you know!" -- but I didn't dare, and mushroom-hunting is very much a familial affair. You don't share your best spots.