Is there's a big mushroom growing out of my tree an emergency?
Within weeks. The shelf is a fruiting body — the reproductive structure. The organism has been living inside the wood digesting it long before anything appeared on the outside. So the shelf is not the problem, it is the announcement. The practical translation is that there is a volume of decayed wood inside the trunk or the root collar, and the real job is establishing how much sound wood remains around it and whether that remaining shell is enough to hold the tree up.
What changes while you wait
This is where homeowners get frightened into paying after-hours rates they never needed. A conk on a tree that is straight and full, with no crack, no soil movement, and no crown thinning, is a get-it-looked-at-this-month item, not a tonight item — decay advances over seasons and years. What changes the answer immediately is a second symptom stacking onto the first: a conk plus a lean, a conk plus a stem crack, a conk plus heaved or cracked soil at the base, or a conk plus a crown that thinned this year. Any of those pairings moves it to same-week. Absent that, the correct response is an inspection now and a scheduled re-inspection.
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