Rain runs down the trunk and pools on the bracket's upper surface. The fungus does not seem to mind. For decades, it grows as a crust against the bark, dark brown, nearly invisible. Then one season it extends outward. A shelf forms. Hard. Woody. The colour of old leather. The underside is a maze of pores, each one a mouth. Water drips from them after rain. The bracket persists year after year, adding a new layer of tube tissue each summer. Some specimens reach thirty centimetres across. Age is impossible to determine. The mycelium inside the tree may be older than the forest above it. The beech bracket lives on beech. Almost exclusively. Red beech, silver beech, mountain beech. It tolerates no other genus. The mycelium invades through wounds. Broken branches. Frost cracks. Bark scored by possum claws. Once inside, it digests lignin. White rot spreads through the heartwood. The tree compartmentalises. Walled-off sections form dark lines. The fungus waits. It can survive for years in dead wood after the tree falls. On logs, it fruits prolifically. The brackets become larger, darker, less constrained. Habitat is any stand of southern beech (Nothofagaceae) in New Zealand. It occurs from sea level to treeline. The fungus prefers mature trees with thick bark. Young beech in regenerating forest rarely host it. The bracket needs time. It needs wounds. It needs the slow accumulation of mycelial mass inside the trunk. Old-growth forest provides these conditions. Plantation beech does not exist. There are no beech plantations. Every beech forest is natural. Every beech forest older than 150 years likely contains this fungus somewhere. Threats are indirect. Possums damage bark, creating entry points. Deer browsing reduces regeneration, which does not affect the fungus directly but changes forest structure over centuries. Climate shift may alter the moisture balance. Drier summers mean less rain running down trunks. The bracket needs water on its surface to disperse spores. No rain, no reproduction. No reproduction, no new infections. The existing brackets persist. But the population ages without replacement. Range across New Zealand matches the distribution of southern beech. North Island: Te Urewera, the central plateau, Tararua Range. South Island: Nelson, Marlborough Sounds, West Coast, Canterbury high country, Otago, Fiordland, Southland. Stewart Island beech forests also host it. Absent from Northland, Auckland, Waikato, and most of Canterbury's lowlands where beech does not grow.