Turkey Tail
No known toxinsTrametes versicolor
Turkey tail is one of the most common fungi on dead hardwood anywhere in the temperate world, and one of the easiest to recognise once you check the underside. It is too tough to eat and is used for tea and extracts.
Quick facts
- If eaten
- No known toxins, but too tough and leathery to eat as food. Commonly used for tea. Several lookalikes are also non-toxic, so the stakes here are low.
- Under the cap
- pores
- Spore print
- white
- Cap
- Thin, flexible, fan-shaped brackets in overlapping tiers, banded in concentric rings of contrasting colour with a velvety surface and a pale outer edge.
- Stem
- None — attached directly to the wood.
- Growing on
- wood dead
- Season
- All year, most visible in autumn and winter.
How to identify it
- Underside covered in tiny pores, not gills. This is the test that separates it from its lookalikes.
- Thin and flexible — it bends without snapping.
- Concentric bands of contrasting colour with a velvety upper surface.
- Overlapping tiers on dead hardwood.
What it is confused with
One test settles each of these.
False turkey tail
False turkey tail has a smooth underside with no pores at all.
Read this before anything else
- Never eat a wild mushroom identified by a website or an app.That includes this one. These tools narrow possibilities; they cannot see your mushroom, its base, its smell or its habitat, and the difference between a meal and a liver transplant is sometimes a feature buried in the soil.
- Get it confirmed in person by an experienced local forager or a mycological society. Most regions have one, most run free identification sessions, and they will look at the actual specimen.
- Dig, do not pull. The cup at the base of a death cap is often underground. Pulling the mushroom leaves the most important feature in the soil.
- If someone has eaten a wild mushroom and feels unwell, call poison control now — in the US, 1-800-222-1222. Do not wait for symptoms to worsen. Amatoxin poisoning has a false recovery phase, and delayed treatment is what makes it fatal. Save any uneaten pieces for identification.