A wide variety of shelf fungi exist, but the ones you are mostly likely to see in a walk through the forest are those sticking out from the trunk or branch of a tree like a small shelf. Sheld fungi do not have a stalk and the underside is typically smooth with minute pores you can often see only with a hand lens. Boletes are typical looking mushrooms with a cap and stalk. The underside of the cap is covered with pores and the spores of the mushroom develop inside these pores and are shed at maturity. Boletes are typically thick and fleshy are are often riddled with the larvae of various beetles and flies.
Boletes are most common in the late summer and early fall, particularly after hot, rainy weather.
Coral fungi may also be small with only a few branches, or in a few cases of a single stem. Coral fungi can be found throughout the year, but mostly in the late summer and fall. Some species are found on the trunks of downed trees, but some arise directly from the humus of the forest floor. The gilled mushrooms are the most numerous and diverse of the mushrooms of the Eastern Deciduous Forest. Gilled mushrooms vary in size from minute to moderately large and in edibility from delicious to deadly poisonous.