Early winter fungi foray

A little more rain and few more days will find a few members of the Sacramento Tracker Club eyes-to-the-ground hunting fungi in the Sierra Nevada foothills.

A mycology club from UC Davis will be leading us to search for the wily bolete, and other things. We should be able to reliably identify some more edibles by the end of the day.

You doing anything similar in your area?

to late in the year up here but heading over to the "mushroom club" at the University of Minnesota is on my list of thing to do.if nothing more i would just like to ID the ones i see when i'm canoeing up north.if you run into just right damp early fall weather the woods are full of all sorts of them.i have plenty of photos but limited knowledge of just what they are.i have no plans on eating any.

Post up what you find.

ON my ride today I saw a bunch of mushrooms poppinup!

Todd - at what elevation[s] did you see the wily fungi??

Thanks.

here's one with a survival angle.it's the Jack O'Lantern mushroom which is very toxic.


it looks like the Chanterelles mushroom which is said to be a real taste treat,i have never tried one,it grows on the ground while the Jack O' Lantern grows on wood,like the one in my photo.
the Jack is said to glow in the dark,hence the name.so if you crawl out of your bush shelter at nite looking for something to add to your rat stew and see a glowing mushroom on wood that looks like the high price dried one you saw in a gourmet food shop pass it by.

3400-3600ft

I`ll try to get pics tomororw if I can, it snowed and rained today.

Great! I think we are starting just under 4000 feet elevation east of Georgetown. Supposedly our local guide is prepared to make some elevation adjustments if the first spot does not pan out. [My hope is to be shown more than the one area I already know.]

First report - great day.

Drive until vehicles begin to fishtail on morning ice and snow in highway. Turn and drive back a few miles.

Park in volunteer fire station area per our local leader and retired fire guy. Cold, snow seasoning the ground here and there. A recent burn area - some stumps still smoking, lots of char, and drifts of burned duff. Fungi zero except one guy found some oyster mushrooms growing out from under a log.

Back to rendezvous. Help damsel in distress try to find her lost cell phone by backtracking. No phone but find four kinds of mushrooms. Abandon her after 15-20 minutes, when she could not remember any particular place she had been, to rejoin the group which has moved down the road.

Group drives to lower elevation and searches. Mushrooms of several kinds found, especially in leaf litter under oak trees [tan and canyon oak I think]. Damsel reports finding phone lying on deer trail after she followed her mother's lead in retracing their steps from where they started.

Restaurant back room rendezvous and ID session. Folks who gambled on lower elevations than any I saw found many more types of mushrooms. Group collected about 30 types overall.

I focused on edible fungi. Oyster, white chantrelle, deer, puffball, and "slippery Jack" 'shrooms.

Made some more contacts, learned about some more 'shrooming hot spots, and solidified some new relationships. I need to invest in the local bible, Mushrooms Demystified, and spend some time with it.

Pictures will be on the Yahoo Group for the Sacramento Tracker Club.

Also gathered more acorn for some culinary experiments.

Found a downed Sugar Pine and harvested some very green, very long needle clusters to make pine needle baskets in the next few weeks.

Excellent dweste, thanks for the update. Let us know how the acorns turn out.

Also an oddity: I spotted a clump of white, rounded shapes in the woods and got excited thinking they were mushrooms. Suprisingly they were very regular in shape and were lableled, "Titleist."

Titleist are worth picking and store very well, but are hardly worth cooking.

Used GoodShop to order my Amazon copy of Mushrooms Demystified.

David Arora's text is good. It is too heavy to carry in the field but it is a superb reference.

Are you in truffle country?
http://www.natruffling.org/orwhttrf.htm
http://www.fungaljungal.org/truffle.htm

I do not think so, but will check.

Edit: I am attending a huge Fungus Fair in Berkeley CA on December 5 at the Lawrence Hall of Science and will ask about truffles.

Second foray. My friend Richard and I spent 3 hours or so covering less than 100 yards of a side road near New Bullard's Bar Reservoir finding 27 plus types of fungi. Pictures on the Yahoo Group site for The Sacramento Tracker ....

An amazing treaure trove of colors and shapes. Many lessons on field collecting were learned as we made mistakes. Now we need to work on identification!

Edit: Reflections. We probably were too greedy in collecting the number of fungi we did. Harvesting fewer kinds and getting better notes and photos of each on site would stand us in better stead long term. Also saddled ourselves with a big job back at the ranch to figure out all the IDs. Hard to resist the candy shop spread we found though!

The spore print experiment was a mixed success. Most mushroom caps left easily discernible piles of spores in various shades of dark or light; some just became slime. We noted whatever details were obvious.

I think a color bar or other color standard would be helpful. A way to judge color against a couple of different backgrounds would be nice. And something stronger than a handheld magnifying glass would seem to be in order.

Arora's, Mushrooms Demystified, arrived from Amazon. Much to learn.

I used to carry small sheets just for spore prints.
I made them by getting a sheet of white paper and a sheet of black paper, cutting them in half and laminating them in plastic so I had a single sheet that was half black and half white on both sides. The standard laminating plastic is fine.

I actually got two sheets out of this and that gave 4 half and half surfaces for spore prints.
The advantage of having the contrast is that you can place a cap at the place where the colours change and get a clear print no matter if the spores are light or dark.
Being laminated in plastic means the sheets are easy to clean and they last a long time.
Plastic also lets you lift the spores off if you want to do other things with them.

One friend used to take the spore prints on art paper. She used picture frames and put the print behind glass, matted so it didn't touch. A bit artsy-farsty for my tastes but she did sell a few of them.

Thanks, scafool!

Drive until vehicles begin to fishtail on morning ice and snow in highway. Turn and drive back a few miles.
Ya that was kinda of fun

Park in volunteer fire station area per our local leader and retired fire guy. Cold, snow seasoning the ground here and there. A recent burn area - some stumps still smoking, lots of char, and drifts of burned duff. Fungi zero except one guy found some oyster mushrooms growing out from under a log.

All i found were some unknown white mushrooms and mud.

Group drives to lower elevation and searches. Mushrooms of several kinds found, especially in leaf litter under oak trees [tan and canyon oak I think]. Damsel reports finding phone lying on deer trail after she followed her mother's lead in retracing their steps from where they started.

Alas i didn't find any whily mushrooms at the lower level.
but I did find whily acorns to give to dweste.

Restaurant back room rendezvous and ID session. Folks who gambled on lower elevations than any I saw found many more types of mushrooms. Group collected about 30 types overall.

It was interesting to see all the different kinds of mushrooms.

I focused on edible fungi. Oyster, white chantrelle, deer, puffball, and "slippery Jack" 'shrooms.

Made some more contacts, learned about some more 'shrooming hot spots, and solidified some new relationships. I need to invest in the local bible, Mushrooms Demystified, and spend some time with it.

Thanks for the reminder on the title of that book


katarin]

Good to see you online, Kat.

Kat is a member of The Sacramento Tracking and Wilderness Training Group if you are loooking for a second source of info on the group.

On Saturday a couple of us will be attending an outdoor skills / awareness class in the Napa hills, after which if energy permits we hope to harvest some toyon berries and fungi. We will cook up the toyon berries into jelly and take the fungi to be identified by experts at the Fungi Fair on Sunday in Berkeley.

You got anything going?

Back from the awareness class. Pre-class we harvested toyon berries and during class breaks we harvested some mushrooms. Next day [today] we spent at the awesom 40th annual fungus fair at UC Berkeley's Lawrence Hall of Science.

After getting over the spectacular view of the SF Bay from the LHS we learned, tasted, and made contacts to do more of the same, re many mushrooms. Great event.