chicken of the woods
Laetiporus sulphureus
Look at this beauty! Aposematism, my ass!
This big orange fella is the yellow-pored chicken-of-the-woods mushroom, so called on account of it has yellow pores (which, ok, rude) and because it's like one of those big cartoon drumsticks hanging out in trees telling you "please, please, won't you come eat us?"
(And it's not aposematic at all, and nobody said that - but it's brightly colored the way animals signal that they're dangerous, so I made that little goof. As far as I can tell, in most cases by the time you can spot a mushroom it's most of the way done releasing its spores already. This, plus the fact that a mushroom's fruiting body is just a small portion of the organism that makes it, is why it's usually (but not always!) not harmful to the fungus to pick its mushrooms.)
Anyway. Chicken!
These bruise so dang easy but gosh, they're pretty. They have so much moisture in them, you have to cook them right after picking or they'll turn mushy. Sautee them and that color stays bright, too!
Chicken of the woods is easy to identify in my region and safe to eat (with all the general caveats about identifying and cooking mushrooms not reproduced here, of course). I'm specifically not going to go over mushroom ID here, because I don't want anyone following my advice on funguses if we're not in person to look at them together.
Its sister species L. cincinnatus is the same way, just with pale creamy edges instead of yellow ones, and I think it flushes out a month or two sooner. I actually saw some white-pored chicken in the next stump over a while back - the stump was huge and it had rotted out in the center, and I was walking by and just saw it positively glowing up at me from the bottom of the hole. And like. I know this is how you get isekai'd by the fae, but. I had to, you know? So I told my partner, hey, I'm sorry for doing this, and I dove headfirst into the core of the tree stump, giggling madly, and came out clutching a fistful of bright orange mushrooms.
It was worth it, even if by the time I got out they were too dirty to even clean and eat properly. Gotta find the magic in the dead things.
So, chicken (of the woods). "COW" if you mingle in the forager circles.
They really resemble nothing so much as a cutlet of meat ready to be cooked. Nature's wild.