I took one of the longer routes in on my bike today, and as I zipped through one particularly wooded trail section I found myself trying to scan the ground for signs of mushrooms.  Not very easy at that speed!

We had much better luck yesterday, when Karen and I took Bruno for a walk in the river gorge.  Mere feet away from the steps leading down the ridge we saw numerous … somethings … in several clumps on the ground.  White spores and otherwise fairly indistinct makes it pretty hard for us rookies to identify.  Then after another few steps off the trail Karen spotted these guys at right: awesome!  I don’t remember it now, but we were able to pretty positively identify them.

All in all a very successful outing.  What a difference to explore some of these areas after the rains we had last week – we were in similar terrain with my parents a few weeks ago when it was still dry and it was hard to find anything!  Now they’re popping up everywhere.

Saturday morning was also a good hunt – Karen had to help run a watershed cleanup down in Hastings, and I got come along and "help", that is, hunt mushrooms if I promised to take a trash bag with me and also collect any trash I saw.  I ended up filling a few bags of trash, and also finding some really big gilled mushrooms and a few nice sized boletes.  … all of which defied identification.  One of the young gilled specimens had a pretty cool cortina (I think – basically a cobweb protection around the gills), and sort of purple flesh, but even with those good clues I couldn’t figure it out.  The bolete flesh turned reddish brown when exposed to air, and all the ones I found were enclosed in a partial veil of some sort.  Also good clues, but not enough for me to figure out.

Great hunting, though!  Next I think I need to start identifying trees more accurately, as that will give me a better clue as to what mushrooms might be growing near them…

The take-away message: hunt slowly, not at 20 mph.  The act of stopping and stooping to grab a piece of trash often lead my eyes to a mushroom that I would certainly have walked past, even though I was actively looking for them.  It’s important to mix it up, crouch down, and always check the back side of the trees!

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