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!