The bracket is small. Smaller than a fingernail when young. At maturity, it reaches three centimetres across. Some specimens stay smaller. The upper surface is velvety, brown, with a pale margin. The underside is porous. Each pore is a tube. The tubes are brown. The colour matches the bark of its host. Stand ten metres away and you see nothing unusual. Walk closer. Kneel. The brackets appear in tiers, one above the other, climbing the dead branch like stairs. They are hard. Woody. You cannot scrape them off with a thumbnail. Habitat is any place where manuka grows. Coastal scrub. Regenerating hillsides. Abandoned farmland. Road cuttings. The margins of geothermal areas. The fungus tolerates poor soils. It tolerates drought. It tolerates wind. Manuka colonises disturbed ground. The bracket colonises manuka. The relationship is tight but not exclusive. It also grows on kanuka (Kunzea robusta) and, rarely, on rawirinui (Kunzea ericoides). It avoids forest interior. It prefers edges. The light is better. The air moves. The wood dries faster between rains. Range across New Zealand is continuous. North Island populations occur from Northland to Wellington, including the Coromandel, Bay of Plenty, Rotorua lakes, Taupo, Taranaki, Manawatu, and Wairarapa. South Island populations are common in Nelson, Marlborough Sounds, West Coast, Canterbury, Otago, and Southland. Also present on Stewart Island and the Chatham Islands. The species follows manuka. Manuka follows disturbance. The fungus does not occur in undisturbed old-growth forest. It does not need to. It has other places to live. Diet is saprotrophic but facultatively parasitic. Phellinus ferrugineofuscus causes a white rot in manuka heartwood. On living trees, it enters through branch stubs and bark cracks. The infection spreads slowly. The tree compartmentalises. A small bracket appears. The tree lives for years with the fungus inside. On dead wood, the bracket fruits heavily. The mycelium consumes the entire branch. The wood becomes pale, soft, crumbly. A single manuka branch may host twenty brackets. The branch falls. The fungus continues on the ground until the wood is gone. Threats are minimal due to the abundance of manuka across New Zealand. Land clearance for pine plantations removes habitat locally. Intensive farming removes manuka from large areas. The fungus survives in fragments. Roadside scrub. Erosion plantings. The margins of conservation land. A greater threat is competition. Phellinus ferrugineofuscus is slow. Other wood decay fungi colonise manuka faster in wetter climates. In the West Coast region, it is rare. Too wet. The competitors win. In Canterbury and Otago, it is common. The dry air slows the competitors. The Manuka Bracket persists.