Yellow Fairy Cup

Description:

These appear as yellow or orange-yellow cup- or disc-shaped fruitbodies, growing in tight and dense mass, growing on surface of naked (barkless) wood of rotting logs. They are small, not exceeding 4mm in diameter (see pic N°4 for comparison with my field scale), with brad stalk - stalk is almost invisible, as the discs when older, fold around.

Habitat:

Grows on naked wood, on old logs discarded and lying around on forest floor (in pictures 3 and 5, the log was upended to facilitate the picture taking). Lowland broadleaved forest (oak and beech), in Geneva lake valley.

Notes:

This was a tough call to ID - and to be honest, I'm still not 100% sure of it. There are few other species, look-alikes, that can easily be confounded - I got stuck with Dacrymyces stillatus, Bisporella sulphurina and Bisporella citrina. Finally, I discarded Dacrymyces because of the presence of stalk and that lightly folded shape; and would expect B. suplhurina to be a tad smaller.