Pretty Poison(ous) Fall Mushrooms

Amanita for sure.

Veil hangs off the cap's edge -- like a slip showing.

Shreds of a veil.

Two weeks ago, edibles were widely available, but today's pass through the woods showed me some strange and beautiful fungi that, after I looked them up, I found belonged to the Amanita family. Avoid this deadly family. Its mushrooms can be white, yellow, orange, red, gray, brown, or greenish. Gorgeous but poisonous. How are these Amanitas although they look so different? They show family characteristics. If you see even ONE of these characteristics, stay away.

1. Amanitas grow from a bulbous base.
2. Amanitas have a thin "veil" from the stem to edges that tears and shreds as the mushroom grows. Often, there are shreds left hanging, like a slip showing. Often, there's a ring around the stem where the veil was attached.
3. Amanita caps often have pimples or scales, or they look as if they were salted with flake salt or peppered.
4. Some Amanitas have shaggy stems.

These are from the woods, but Amanitas also appear in lawns and in mulch bought from garden stores.

Nature's Spirograph

Maybe you remember the Spirograph -- a set of interlocking gear wheels and pens that allowed youth to create highly engineered Space-Age designs, mostly circles -- or you recall cutting designs into potatoes and inking the cut edges with a roller inked on a sheet of glass, and then printing the result -- did that in Girl Scouts. And while I haven't done those since, I did pluck the cap from a bolete and placed the cap gills down where a sheet of white paper and a sheet of black paper met, and left it undisturbed overnight -- because spores of unidentified 'shrooms could be light or dark, and the spore print, and its color, and the shapes of the spores themselves, are crucial to a solid I.D., especially for summer mushrooms that have many variants: amanitas, russulas, and then boletes. All of you will know a bolete when you see one. They don't have bladelike gills beneath their caps but have spongelike undersides. The print came out beautifully, the best one yet. It is art. Meanwhile, the cap, on the right, dried out a little. A friend saw the photo and said, "Is that a toasted bagel?"

Mushroom Identification Challenge #1

Mushroom hunters eye every downed and rotted tree on every forested slope that has what looks like fertile soil (indicated by clusters of growing greenery), and the closer to water, the better. Poking around in the woods I saw no fresh fungi, and shrugged and trotted onward -- "guess there aren't any" -- when I was stopped short by this club-shaped white growth, about four inches long, on an old fallen log. It was fleshy-feeling, cool, dry, and fresh.

Mushrooms are I.D.'d more by their shapes and gills and stems and location rather than their size and color; size and color can vary with age or conditions. This bulbous thing had no shape, no gills, and no stem. Didn't have the mushroom handbook along. Didn't want to cut it and take it home; it was a protected area, and I had no knife or basket with me. So I took photos and at home enlarged and studied them, and downloaded and consulted a mushroom-I.D. app ($1.69 at Google Play, and worth it) I can use next time I'm in the field.

This is a Bearded Tooth (Hericium erinaceus), so fresh its beard hasn't had time to grow long and shaggy. Yes, it's edible, but I was not hungry, and it is good mushroom-hunter ethics to catch-and-release for someone else, or someone hungrier, to enjoy. Looks kind of like a coconut-covered Hostess Sno-Ball. Or a white bath mat.

Chicken

My mushroom classes and forays with the mushroom society have taught me to recognize several common mushrooms, but one is always seeking the edible ones, and here I found one in a ground-level hole in a tree, a few "petals" of Chicken of the Woods or Sulfur Shelf (Laetiporus sulphureus), so called because of its bright-yellow underside. This isn't Hen of the Woods (Grifola frondosa), which looks like an actual hen with gray feathers and no head; years ago I found a glorious 24-ounce Hen in my woods, which I kept for a while out of sheer delight with it, and now I know that one was edible too. The Sulfur Shelf should perhaps be called "Chicken Breast of the Woods," because it has lovely dense white meat, divinely scented like canned mushroom soup.

The pieces you can break off from the shelf-like whole are fresh enough to eat, and I broke off about three ounces, leaving the remainder. Having checked it with my mushroom-identification manuals, and having seen slides and real-life samples in a course and actually obtained some recipes for Chicken of the Woods (always cook wild mushrooms), I was sure this was the choice edible, but was too chicken to take even a sliver, saute it and bite. I left it for wildlife to enjoy.