Touch it and it bleeds. The bracket is soft when young. The upper surface is reddish-brown. The margin is pale, almost white. Press the margin with your finger. Red liquid seeps out. Blood-coloured. The fungus weeps. The droplets are slow. They form at the edges. They do not run. They stay where they form, beading on the surface. The older the bracket, the less it bleeds. Mature specimens are hard. Dark brown. The margin is gone. Press them and nothing happens. The bleeding stops. The bracket is dead. It will remain on the log for another year, dry and useless. Range across New Zealand is fragmented. Confirmed records exist from Northland, Waikato, the Coromandel, Bay of Plenty, Taranaki, Manawatu, Wellington, Nelson, Marlborough Sounds, West Coast, Canterbury, and Otago. The species appears absent from Southland and Stewart Island. This may reflect climate. The fungus needs mild winters. Not cold. Not frozen. Southland's frosts are too frequent. The bracket also requires mature forest. Fragments smaller than fifty hectares rarely host it. Large tracts of podocarp forest in the central North Island and West Coast hold the strongest populations. Threats are habitat loss and fragmentation. The NZ Bleeding Bracket depends on large-diameter logs. Trees that fell a century ago. Logs that have not yet crumbled. Clearfell logging removes these logs. Plantation forestry replaces native forest. The fungus cannot colonise pine. It does not grow on small branches. It needs trunk wood. It needs volume. A single fallen rimu may host twenty brackets. A pine log hosts none. Climate change also threatens. The bleeding bracket fruits in autumn. Warmer, drier autumns reduce fruiting. The mycelium survives. The brackets do not appear. Years without fruiting mean no spores. No spores mean no new infections. Habitat is mature lowland podocarp and broadleaf forest. Rimu. Miro. Matai. Tawa. Tree ferns are not sufficient. The fungus grows on fallen trunks and standing dead trees. It prefers logs suspended above the ground. Air circulation matters. Logs on wet soil rot too fast. The bracket needs years to develop. Young brackets appear in autumn. They grow through winter. By spring, they are mature. Hard. Dark. Non-bleeding. They persist through summer. Autumn brings new growth at the margins. The old bracket expands. The bleeding returns at the new edge. Diet is saprotrophic. Ischnoderma resinosum causes a brown rot in the wood of native trees. It digests cellulose. It leaves lignin behind. The wood becomes brown, cubically cracked, brittle. It crumbles between fingers. The bracket prefers heartwood. It does not grow on bark. It does not grow on sapwood without heartwood beneath. The log must be large enough to contain heartwood. Small branches lack it. The fungus waits. It waits for the right log. It waits for the right moisture. It waits for autumn. Then it bleeds.