Chicken of the woods or Shaggy bracket

The fruiting body is bushy, with 5-30 overlapping fan-shaped caps on a shared base. Individual caps are 10-30 cm across and 6-30 cm tall, flat, spreading, fan-shaped and fleshy. The surface is smooth or finely felted; young caps glow yellow-orange, like fresh sulphur, and look glossy in wet weather. The colour is a striking sulphur-yellow to orange-yellow, typically shading from a rich orange centre to a yellow or cream margin. Older caps fade to pale yellow and cream.

There's no stem: the bracket is broadly attached, semicircular, hoof-shaped or cushion-like, 10 to 25 cm across, sometimes up to 35 cm, and up to 10 cm thick. It grows singly or in tiers of two or three. The margin is thick and rounded when young, becoming thinner.

Young brackets are bright rusty orange to reddish yellow on top, densely velvety and bristly. Later they turn rusty to dark brown, almost bald, rough and cracked, and finally black, hard and brittle. Old brackets often hang on the tree all winter, and when they fall they leave a blackish mark on the bark.

The underside is a tube layer with fine sulphur-yellow pores (2-4 pores/mm), coloured sulphur-yellow to orange. Spore print: white.

The pores are cream to yellowish brown, later rusty, 2 to 3 per mm, and darken when touched. The tubes can be a few centimetres long. Young brackets sometimes weep clear, yellowish or reddish droplets from the pores and margin.

Sources disagree on the spore print colour: from whitish to yellowish brown.

No distinct stem — the caps attach to the substrate by a broad base or a short lateral stem.

There's no stem: the bracket is broadly attached to the trunk or branch.

In young brackets the flesh is tender, meaty, juicy and cream-yellow, much like chicken breast. In old ones it's tough, leathery, fibrous and inedible. It doesn't change colour when cut. The smell is distinctive, sourish-fruity and mushroomy, with a hint of fresh cucumber, and the taste is mild and delicately mushroomy, with a hint of chicken.

Young flesh is soft, spongy, wet and radially fibrous, yellowish ochre to light brown. Old flesh is dry, hard, brittle and dark brown to almost black. It turns black with KOH.

A distinctive sourish-fruity smell with a hint of fresh cucumber, and an easy one to recognise.

The smell is indistinct.