10/09/2025
You're walking in the woods. There's no one around, and your phone is dead. Out of the corner of your eye, you spot it:
Chicken of the woods? Chanterelles?
NO!
These are jack-o'-lantern mushrooms! They are a poisonous lookalike for not one, but two separate edible mushrooms (those I just listed above). And today I'll teach you how to tell the difference.
The easiest way to tell jacks from COTW is by color and shape. First off, they are *completely* orange (one might even say, pumpkin colored?); compare this to chickens, which can be orange above, but are typically somewhere between yellow and peach colored underneath. As for shape, COTW are a type of shelf fungus, which means they project horizontally from their substrate (i.e. whatever tree part they're growing out of) and tend to be semicircular, or even shaped like pizza slices. Frequently, though of course not always, their edges are also wavy. Jacks, however, as you can see here, grow out from the substrate on a classic mushroom stalk, and are topped with a round cap. It tends to be slightly indented in the middle, like a funnel.
As for the comparison with chanterelles, it takes a bit more of a discerning eye. At the broadest level, jacks grow from wood while chanterelles grow from soil. In some cases, like in the third photo with the Oak Ridge Bird Dogs, it can look like they're growing from soil but they're actually fanning out along the dead tree's roots. Jacks also grow in clusters, while chants emerge singly or in pairs. And if you look under the cap, you'll see that jack-o'-lanterns have true gills - thin lines running up the stalk to the edge of the cap - whereas chanterelles do not (they do have veins, which are thicker and almost entirely on the stalk).
FWIW jack-o'-lantern mushrooms are completely safe as long as you don't eat them (my boys there are fine to sniff around). And they're plenty cool on their own - did you know they're bioluminescent? If you find some, come back at night, or even just bring a box with a hole cut to look through; you'll finally know what "foxfire" looks like!
