The green or yellowish fruit on Staghorn Cholla (Cylindropuntia versicolor, formerly Opuntia versicolor) cacti often take on a red or purple tinge in the fall and winter.

These fruits are not yet ripe because they are still bumpy and covered in prominent tubercles.

Staghorn Cholla fruit grows and swells as it ripens, eventually becoming smooth and rounded.

Staghorn Cholla fruit is not poisonous, but it is not commonly eaten as it really is more like tough cactus stem than sweet fruit. Birds and animals will usually ignore these fruits in favor of the sweeter and tastier Prickly Pear fruits.

Staghorn Cholla fruit is mostly spineless, but it does have some tiny glochids (micro-spines) which are far worse than the larger spines because they are very difficult to remove and exquisitely painful to the touch. I use sticky tape to get most of them off, but a few glochids will require a very delicate tweezer extraction to avoid breaking them off under the skin. Glochids can be serious trouble if they get in the eyes or on the tongue, which thankfully has never happened to me.