Very nice picture! I like trying to ID and photograph shrooms when I'm hiking as well. And collect when it's legal and positive ID.
Mycology
I've gotten a few cool mushroom pics, I love the variety of shapes and colors you can find. I got a really neat bright orange one before, otherwise this is probably the prettiest one I've seen.
There's been a lot of fallen trees on our property this year, so I'll have to keep my eyes open!
Bright orange can be really cool. Could be jack o'lanterns (which I have found but never actually got to see glow) or chicken of the the woods which I have found and ate, have some in my freezer right now in fact. Or they could be totally different depending on time and location.
Those aren't mushrooms, they're conks
A mushroom or toadstool is the fleshy, spore-bearing fruiting body of a fungus, typically produced above ground, on soil, or on its food source.
Thank you for clarifying. That was my takeaway from reading the polypores Wikipedia article.
Conks are all mushrooms, but not all mushrooms are conks.
Neat, I hadn't heard that term before. I'll have to read more about them.
On a convenient note, the wiki for polypores had a pic of the orange "mushroom" I had found.