It's time to get out the mushroom guide again

A much improved day today, warm and with blue skies. The signs that Autumn is just around the corner are everywhere, with the first fungi of the season beginning to burst forth on the sand dunes.

The big fella is a Mosaic puffball Handkea utriformis. (Utriformis means womb-shaped). It is edible when young but this one was getting long in the tooth and thus escaped the frying pan.

The lesser mortal is a species of waxcap, grassland saprophytes that obtain their nutrition from decaying organic matter. The various small red, orange or yellow waxcaps are notoriously difficult to identify, and many cannot be identified with certainty without resorting to microscopic analysis. However, given that I found it among the dunes I am pretty confident that it is the Dune Waxcap Hygrocybe conicoides, which occurs in short grass mainly on coastal sand dunes.