Dryad's Saddle?

Here's a cool-looking mushroom I saw sprouting out of a fallen dead tree trunk. It was identified on iNaturalist as a Dryad's Saddle mushroom (AKA Pheasant's Back mushroom). 

If this is a Dryad's Saddle, it's considered edible when cooked, and pleasant enough to eat when young. (It sounds like it gets all fibrous when it gets old.)

Years ago I bought a book called Mushrooms of Northeastern North America with the intention of learning to identify our local mushrooms. There were problems:

  • Though I'm sure New Jersey has only a subset of these, the book covers 1500 species of mushrooms. That's a lot of potential candidates to work through.
  • For many species, a proper ID often requires obtaining a spore print, obtained by putting the mushroom on a piece of white paper, covering it, and waiting 8 hours. Spore prints aren't really compatible with my light-traveling, quick-visiting nature walks.
  • Finally, I'd hate to identify a mushroom as edible only to find out that my ID got someone poisoned. (I know this can happen with plants too.)
In short, I got a little intimidated by the scope of mushroom identification.

FWIW dryads were Greek tree nymphs, particularly associated with oak trees. Since nymphs are generally depicted as approximately human-sized, I don't think most of these mushrooms would be big enough to form much of a saddle. Though the size doesn't seem to work, these mushrooms usually grow out of hardwood trees, so there is a tree connection between dryads and these mushrooms.

May 25, 2023 at Duke Farms
Photo 292816653, (c) jpviolette, some rights reserved (CC BY-NC)


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