I especially like fungi that are striking and easy to identify, such as Chicken of the Woods and Shaggy Ink Cap. So I was thrilled to see my first specimens of the Sandy Stiltball, Battarrea phalloides, a couple of weeks ago.

A group of Sandy Stiltballs (Battarrea phalloides) on a road verge

The Sandy Stiltball is very easy to recognise. Mushroomexpert.com describes it as looking “like a puffball stuck on a long, shaggy spike” and Peter Marren describes a group of them growing “like crops of giant matchsticks, their dusty heads brown and peeling in the blinking light” (Peter Marren: “Mushrooms”, British Wildlife Publishing 2012). The fungus has been described as one of the few fungi that can be identified reliably from a passing car but in spite of this, I found that the fruit bodies blended in well with the dry vegetation and soil on the bank. I was glad that I had been tipped off about where I could find it, on a roadside nature reserve in Norfolk.

We hadn’t had much rain when I saw my specimens, but then this fungus is adapted to grow in very dry places, which makes it rather unusual. In Britain it seems to need a dry, sunny habitat. In North America specimens are found in coastal dunes and desert and sagebrush areas.

I was lucky to see it. In Britain the Sandy Stiltball is a rare find, with just 16 sites in total. Six of these sites are in Norfolk but in 2010 the fungus was only seen at two of these sites.

The fungus is included on the Red Data List as “Near Threatened” and it is listed in Schedule 8 of the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, which makes it illegal to either pick or destroy it. Norfolk Wildlife Trust and Norfolk County Council have produced a Species Action Plan for the fungus. But in spite of legal protection, sites have been lost in the past and Peter Marren uses the fungus as an example of how inadequate this protection can be, citing the destruction of one of Norfolk’s best colonies in 2001. [It was actually in Suffolk – see Update 30/08/2014, below]. A digger driver removed temporary fencing that had been erected around the colony and dug up the roadside bank, complete with fungi, but the case was dropped because it couldn’t be proved that the digger driver had deliberately and maliciously destroyed the colony.

Outside Britain Sandy Stiltballs occur in Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, North America and South America, though some scientists think that the North American specimens are a separate species, Battarrea stevenii (reference). But the fungus was first discovered in East Anglia, near Bungay, in 1782 and for a while it was called Bungea, before acquiring the name of the Italian mycologist Giovanni Antonio Battarra.

There are some good pictures of the fungus on the First Nature and Mushroomexpert.com websites. The latter includes some great pictures at the microscopic level.

Update 30/08/2014:

Thanks to Neil Mahler, the Suffolk Fungi Recorder, who has contacted me to tell me a bit more about this sorry tale.

The protected site that was destroyed was at Reydon, near Southwold, in Suffolk.

Some soil was salvaged and placed in a different position a few metres away and although Suffolk Wildlife Trust claimed that fruiting bodies were seen the following year, Neil checked and found none in that year or the following year. He has marked the site as destroyed on his recording database.

On a happier note, he has since discovered six new sites in Norfolk and two new sites in Suffolk.