Winter mushrooms revisited
I found these mushrooms about a week ago in my brush pile. A couple days later I dug them out to get a better look.
Their mycelium bound up a wad of soil with some rotten stems of plants (the substance that makes up most of the brush pile). That supports the likelihood that these are mushrooms produced by a saprobic fungus rather than a symbiotic species.
I wasn't handling them very long before they began to fall apart. This reveals that they are fragile, and that the stipe (stem) is hollow and fibrous.
After I cut the caps off of a couple of them and let them sit on white paper over night, they produced this cinnamon-brown spore print.
The short of it, is that they are still unidentified, but now I have more field markings to show people to try to get an identification.