Findin' Any?

Morel-hunting season has begun in Missouri. It’s hard to believe that I grew up in central Missouri and had almost no idea about this whole scene. My family’s food came from the grocery store and it came from people’s gardens. We were not big mushroom eaters, probably because my mom isn’t a big fan of mushrooms.

Once or twice, perhaps, we had mushrooms at the commons of Grandma Schroeder’s house (yeah, where I live now), if, say, Uncle Richard and Aunt Carole had had a bumper harvest in Moniteau County—enough for them to not eat up immediately; enough for them to bring to Jeff City and share as part of a planned rendezvous for the whole family, perhaps on a work day at Grandma’s yard—I can imagine that could have happened. I can imagine Grandma frying up some chicken and having some potato salad; I can see Aunt Carole frying up the morels just before serving.

I can imagine me looking at the gorgeous, hot, perfectly fried morels with skepticism, taking a bite, and finding them good.

But I don’t clearly recall it.

And even though I spent tons of time hiking and exploring the woods, I also don’t recall ever seeing a morel until I was more than full-grown and had moved back to Missouri in the late 1990s. That’s when Sue and I had started our “Year of the’s” and had two back-to-back “Year of the Mushrooms” (two, on account of the first year being abnormally dry and droughty, so there were few mushrooms to find). (By the way, our “Year of the” projects included all species in the group, not just edibles, so having two years dedicated to learning about mushrooms still only scratched the surface. It’s such a large, diverse group, it was like having “year of the animal” or “year of the plant.”)

I highly recommend having yourself a “Year of the.” Decide on something you’d really like to learn about, and just saturate yourself with it. Turn it into a year-long master’s program on that subject. Devour books about it. Talk about it with others. Look for lectures (and now, YouTubes) about it. Join a club that does it. Every time you go outdoors, look for it. If it’s an activity, like painting or playing an instrument, then try doing it every which way; go to concerts or museums; learn its history; take lessons; attempt related artforms. Spend a year seeing the world through the lens of that thing.

And it will stay with you forever. Like any part of your education, no one can take it away from you.

So as we enter morel season once again, I’d like to share with you one of my favorite morel-hunting stories. (Everyone has a ton of morel-hunting stories, right?) This was during our first Year of the Mushroom. Sue and I were still living in Columbia then, in a duplex in the Country Hill subdivision in southwest Columbia, near the Columbia MKT trail. We spent a lot of time on that section of trail between Columbia and McBaine.

Well, since we were saturating ourselves with mushroom consciousness, we were always on the lookout for morels. We couldn’t go outside without scanning the ground . . . looking.

If you haven’t hunted for morels, you don’t know what a dickens it is to try to see them. This time of year, the ground is covered with dead leaves that are the same colors as morels, plus pinecones . . . and little dead flower stalks from last year, and newly sprouted brittle ferns, and all kind of other odd things that cast reticulated shadows that look like the pockmarked pattern of morels, and catch your eye.

Anyway, we had taken to always carrying a wadded up plastic grocery bag in our back pockets “just in case” we found any mushrooms. (Yes, plastic is not optimal, but we’re talking “just in case.”)

So we got a little sidetracked. We stepped off the trail and down the shallow slope toward a nearby dryish creekbed. Again, . . . just in case. We didn’t have any luck, but as always, we enjoyed poking around. We didn’t have any reason to even pull our plastic bags out of our pockets; it was a bust.

But as we were doing this hunting, several well-coifed ladies had hustled by in their colorful new track outfits; I sensed them looking down at us, casting disapproving looks in our direction. Yes, we had roamed off the trail onto private land (I suppose). We might have even looked sketchy. I don’t think they had a clue what we were up to. Whatever; I don’t care what they might think.

Anyway, we finally gave up and were trudging back up the slope to the MKT trail, and at that point we met a fellow on the trail. He was loping along, but I don’t think he was there to get exercise. He looked like he was out for a nice walk, just kind of sauntering. He was fairly young, in his mid-twenties, I’d say, and he had on a pair of jeans, some worn work boots, and no shirt. He had kind of longish, dirty-blond hair. He looked to me like a native Boone Countian.

And he just half-smiled at us and said, knowingly: “Findin’ any?”

This, my friends, is one of the best things about morel hunting. It’s a club, and an offbeat one. It has nothing to do with race, class, ethnicity, religion, politics . . . anything, other than a taste for morels, a willingness to go into nature, and the thrill of the hunt. And a kind of time-honored competition, with a strong impulse not to divulge the precious locations of perennial troves.

. . . So, how did we respond to this fellow’s inquiry? We said, after a healthy, slightly less-than-innocent pause, “. . . no.” And we all kind of smirked and nodded, and we left him to wonder.

Happy morel-hunting, y’all. And if you’re “findin’ any,” I hope you leave a few for someone else!

Colorful January

That sounds like an oxymoron doesn’t it! “Colorful January.” We usually think of white snow, a scene dominated by blues and cold grays, or else we think of tan, brown, gray, and more tan. At least around here, anyway.

But Sue and I have been hiking as much as we can (post-holiday fitness attempts). And we’ve been seeing things. Maybe we’re just being mighty hopeful, looking for signs of spring wherever we might find them, and imagining we see them when we don’t.

Anyway, on Saturday, we went for a nice little hike at Spring Creek Gap Conservation Area. And we did see some color!

For one thing, there’s the beautiful coppery shine of the many clumps of Virginia broomsedge, or broomsedge bluestem (Andropogon virginicus), one of our native warm-season grasses. I have always admired this plant, recognized it as being quite different from other grasses, long before I knew its name. It’s quite common, but it really shines in winter, after its bluish-green leaves have cured to a glorious copper color.



And as we hiked a little further, we started noticing there were several fallen logs with an eye-popping orange bracket fungus on them: Cinnabar polypores! These tough polypore brackets are bright orange-red above and below.



. . . As you can see.



With fungi this bright and colorful, you almost don’t miss the flowers.

In the creek, there were delicate patches of bright green filamentous algae, flowing after rocks like mermaid hair.

And here are some pretty little mosses and lichens. The tiny goblets are the reproductive structures of the lichen. Lichens, you know, are a life form that comprises both a fungus species and an algae and/or cyanobacteria species, living in a mutually beneficial relationship.



Yeah, yeah, whatever. . . . But mostly, we love them for their cute little pale blue-green fairy goblets, which contrast so nicely with the yellowish greens of the nearby moss!



As the afternoon went on, the sun drifted behind some milky white clouds. Once the golden beams disappeared, it was as if the color had been sucked out of the landscape. The sky was dull white, and it was hard to tell how close we were to sunset.

As we hiked back on the main ridge trail, the sun repaid us for its earlier shyness by dipping down below the clouds that had offended us earlier. As the sun sank below the horizon, its beams poked the bellies of the clouds, tickling them pink and orange, revealing their ripples of relief.



We just stood and took pictures!

What a great day!

So Many Miscellaneous Mushrooms

Hi, folks! With our nice, moist spring and this coolish summer, it has been a great year for mushrooms!

As you might remember, Sue and I enjoy going "mushroom-watching." We like to take picture of them on our hikes, even though we're not very careful about getting identifications "just right." As I explained in a previous post, we usually aren't looking for mushrooms to eat.

Nope, we're not into picking them at all, really--well, except for morels (which we can't resist)--since mushrooms are the fungus's spore-bearing structures, picking them represents a dent in their ability to reproduce. If you don't pick wildflowers because you understand wildflowers create seed, then why pick mushrooms willy-nilly? And so we photograph them.

Sue, with her nice camera, takes excellent photos at various angles, while I concentrate on getting ground-level shots and photos of the undersides, which her big camera can't do (remember, my little camera swivels so I can hold it on the ground, beneath the cap, to photograph gills and pores without disturbing the mushroom).



We recently went hiking on some of the nature trails at Columbia's Cosmos Park--near the Bear Creek Trail. I haven't been hiking out there in ages, though I used to hang out at the beaver pond there a lot during college . . .

Anyway, we decided it'd be fun to check out the place again. My, how it's changed!

And yes, there were a lot of mushrooms popping out--various species--what fun!

Here's some type of bolete we saw.



Here's a more artsy picture of the cap of another type of bolete. (If I do say so myself.) I think it might be a two-colored bolete (Boletus bicolor), but again: I'm not too anal about getting them id'd "just so." I'm content to exclaim, "Wow, look at this beautiful bolete!"



Maybe, when it comes to mushrooms, I'm just easily amused.

Here's one I'm fairly confident about identifying: It's an "old man of the woods" (Strobilomyces floccopus). There was a patch of them at one place along the trail. They were kind of camouflaged against the dirt and leaf litter, but once we saw a few of them, they seemed to be all over (in that area).



This was the first time I'd ever seen this type of mushroom "in person." I've seen pictures of them and thought, "That's a cool-looking thing. Wonder if I'll ever seen one." And there they were!

Since they are usually out in July, August, September, and October, I guess it's not surprising I haven't seen them--midsummer, with the skeeters, other bugs, and humidity, isn't my favorite time for hiking in Missouri. But with the unusual cool weather, we got outside and made discoveries!

Well, these few pictures are just a small sample of what we saw, which was itself just a small sample of all that's out there right now. I mean . . . we weren't even looking for them.



If you're interested in mushrooms and want to get more regular updates on what fungi are popping out here in Central Missouri, check out Lisa K. Suits's blog, Mycologista. She takes lovely photos of mushrooms, and she goes the extra mile to identify them correctly. As she says, she's "crazy for wild mushrooms." But if you ever thought mushrooms were boring, you should scroll through her posts for an attitude adjustment.

It's funny how you can go into the woods, say, with binoculars and a bird guide, and plan on seeing a bunch of birds; or you bring old sneakers, a few nets, and containers and a magnifying lens for looking at aquatic invertebrates--but you end up having a "mushroom trip" instead. Or maybe it's the butterflies that are somehow everywhere that day, or daisies. Nature outings, "field trips," can be like that.

. . . And it's always fun!

Year of the Mushroom: It Never Really Ended

Today, I'm picking up on the subject of my last entry, where I described how Sue and I used to have an annual theme. It started with my unofficial "Year of the Star," after I finished grad school and discovered I really missed "learning things."

When we lived in Columbia, our apartment was in a low area, next to a field and a creek, and we had lots and lots of spiders. I combated my instinctive arachnophobia by reading and learning about spiders. I shared what I'd learned with Sue. That year, which we later called "Year of the Spider," we even had a big lovely argiope on our tomatoes.

Somehow, learning their different names, and preceding each with "Mrs." (because, again, nearly all the ones you see are females), removed their anonymity and made them less scary. Mrs. Cyclosa. Mrs. Araneus. Mrs. Agelenopsis. And audacious Mrs. Phidippus with her groovy tetrachromatic color-vision goggles.




Yes, over the course of a whole year, we stopped to look at just about every single spider we saw, and tried to identify it. And we often fed them, too!

The first time we decided to designate a "Year of the" beforehand was in 1999. Neither of us had much of a clue about mushrooms and other fungi, so we set out consciously to spend a year with the shrooms.




We read mushroom books (and there are a lot of incredibly fun, popular science books about them!)--we started noticing them, "seeing" them.




And, amazingly enough, in August 1999, the annual conference of the North American Mycological Association was held right here in Missouri! We didn't join, but we did make it down to Cape Girardeau to witness some of the events.





But 1999 was a dry year, and overall it was kind of a bust for mushrooms. So we gave it another go--and 2000 became "Year of the Mushroom," too. It turned out to be a good thing--1999 gave us the preparation, the study, the exposure. In 2000, we got out in the woods!




Yep. It was great. We had our first-ever morel hunt, and I learned how to cook morels, too. That spring we found enough to make several dishes, from a delicious Asian stir-fry, to the good ol' "sauté in butter and garlic and add to chicken" stand-by (you can never go wrong with that), to Ozarkian Classique (cut 'em, soak 'em in salted water, rinse, drain, dip in egg, dredge in cornmeal, deep-fry in Crisco or canola, and salt).

We attended a great class--"Mushroom Mystique"--led by Ken Gilberg, held at Shaw's Arboretum. It was a lecture followed by a foray, after which all the shrooms we collected were ID'd by the master!




And we had a great time that year at the international grocery stores! The Italians, Germans, and Russians love mushrooms--and so do the Asians. We found all types--canned, dried, fresh. And they all have great names. Even the Mexicans have a favorite culinary fungus: corn smut (huitlacoche) is a delicacy to them!

We got a "grow-your-own shiitakes" kit. My mom bought me a special "mushroom cleaning brush." I made sushi rolls featuring mushrooms. At Christmas, I suddenly noticed how many ornaments (especially Old World ones) depict mushrooms (often those poisonous/hallucinogenic red-capped Agaricus species).




We never got very good at identifying mushrooms--mainly out of lack of interest. It's not like I'm starving and need to determine which mushrooms are edible. We had plenty to learn about them, culturally, biologically, ecologically.




Did you know that we'd probably be drowning in a sea of fallen branches, sticks, twigs, and leaves, if it weren't for fungi's amazing decomposition powers?




And did you know that some researchers think that the witch trials of old Europe resulted from "flying" hallucinations, excruciating burning sensations, and tissue damage caused by widespread ergot poisoning? (Ergot's a fungus that attacks grain crops.) The folks, being as superstitious as all get-out, attributed their maladies to witchcraft.




And did you know that tall people aren't very good at mushroom hunting? Short people--children especially!--are much better! Some folks think that "Easter egg hunting" evolved from annual springtime morel hunts.




There is so much to appreciate. Indeed, I think there are more absolutely fascinating "gee-whiz" stories about fungi than there are about plants and animals combined.




No, we didn't need to get into mycology so far that we would have to analyze spores microscopically. And the spore prints we made were mainly just for fun.

I made a spore print of a big gilled mushroom that was about five inches across--then I realized I could photocopy the spore print and make, well, "art" out of it. Very cool.




In August of that year there was a big news story out of Oregon, where biologists had determined they'd found the "largest living thing." It was the vast, subterranean mycelium of a "tree-killing mushroom," Armillaria ostoyae, often called the honey mushroom. They're supposed to be edible, but I'm not eager to try them.




I'm pretty sure those are the same doggone things that killed one of our young maples, and the serviceberry we'd planted. We get big clumps of them in our yard, wherever a tree used to be. Doggone it!




I'm kind of mad at them, and I worry that they're going to attack more trees in our yard . . . but I still find their exuberant masses of golden caps a source of wonder. I can't help but enjoy them.




So here it is, 2010, a decade after we had our second "Year of the Mushroom," and when we see a shroom, or a turkeytail, or a yellow blob of witch's butter, we still stop to appreciate the structure, the color, the texture. We still look 'em up in the books. We still have "mushroom consciousness." Hooray!




Throughout this post, I've included pictures of mushrooms that I've taken this fall. Just as spring is the best time to appreciate wildflowers, fall is an excellent time to look for mushrooms. I hope you've enjoyed the pictures as much as I enjoyed taking them!




Note: Just to make it perfectly clear--none of the mushrooms pictured on this blog post are being identified, and I am absolutely not telling you what you can or cannot eat. Consult a real expert for that--I'm just an enthusiastic enthusiast! With a camera!

Springtime! Look for Devil’s Urns!

There’s a wildflower in these parts called harbinger of spring. To be absolutely clear, it’s also known as Erigenia bulbosa, and it’s a member of the carrot-parsley-dill family.

And yep, when you see one, it truly is a sign that spring is on the way, because they start blooming in February and March and disappear soon after that. They are one of the earliest flowers to bloom in the Ozarks.

But they’re little sons-of-guns, and dang hard to see. Well, at least when you’re as tall as I am. If you go for walks in the woods this month with little kids, be sure to show them a picture of harbinger-of-spring, and tell them to hunt for it. You’ll have better luck finding them that way.

Also, harbinger of spring has never seemed very common, in my experience. When you find a patch of them, great, but you can hunt and hunt sometimes and just never find any.

Which is kind of a let-down, this time of year, when you’re thirsty for any and all signs of spring that you can find.

But I went shoe-shopping the other day, and the sight of all that rich, soft, tan, brown, and black leather and suede got me thinking of another favorite sign of spring.

Allow me to introduce an alternative “harbinger of spring”: the devil’s urn fungus.




Now you’re probably going, “ew, yuck, a slimy icky fungus is no substitute for a pretty spring wildflower,” but hold on a second. First, they’re not slimy.

Second, they only grow in the spring, and they begin early—as soon as we start getting some warmer days. Like today, for instance. (Hooray!)

And the harbinger-of-spring wildflower isn’t really all that showy, anyway. They usually are only about a few inches tall when they’re blooming, and the petals are tiny, mostly whitish. The anthers and stems are maroon, and that’s about all the color you see. . . . And that ain’t much.

Meanwhile, the trusty and more common devil’s urn can be fairly large and striking—when they’re fully open, they’re a few inches wide with a bowl that’s slightly deeper than that. And they usually form in clusters.

No, they’re not very colorful—before they open they look something like a bunch of suede brown grapes on the ground, usually alongside a fallen dead tree, but sometimes growing from the ground, attached below to a buried limb, root, or something that you can’t see. They like oak wood.

Once they open, they look like goblets. In fact, the scientific name references this shape twice: The genus portion of the name Urnula craterium means “little urn,” and craterium is from krater, which, you might remember from your art history classes, is a round, wide-mouthed jar the classical Greeks used for mixing wine and water.

(Supposedly the Greeks diluted their wine to keep their party guests from becoming too inebriated—kind of how people at parties today sometimes alternate alcoholic and nonalcoholic drinks over the course of the evening to keep from getting too sloshed too fast. But I digress.)

No, they're not strikingly colorful, but these products of earth, water, and wood are readily spotted and have a striking appearance, despite their earthy tones. And before you go dissing on fungi, remember that “‘beauty is truth, truth beauty,’—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

Indeed, there is something very simple, forthright, and truthful about the devil's urn.

These fungal goblets are gray-brown on the outside, with a texture that always seems like fine suede to me. Inside the bowl, where the spores are produced, the surface is darker and smoother, even kind of shiny. The rim of the opening is usually ragged from when the little ball tore open to become an urn. The overall texture is rather leathery. They’re fleshier when they’re young, especially inside their skins, and become tougher as they grow old.

And when you see them, you’ll know why looking at shoes yesterday brought them to mind!

Stinkhorns!

This year we have stinkhorns in the flower bed with the elephant years! It's the first year we've had them there. (It must be the landscaping mulch!)




We almost missed them, but when we hitched up a skirt of big green hosta leaves, there they were--what a surprise!

Because of their distinct head, I think the species we have is Phallus rubicundus (based on the key at MushroomExpert.com).




Here's one that's all done and gone flaccid.




Because stinkhorns look so phallic, and because of their icky smell and attractiveness to flies, they easily draw attention to themselves. Apparently the Victorians couldn't deal with them very well.

And if you think all this is amusing, you need to see the photos on this Web page.

Behold the Mighty Bird’s-Nest Fungi

My Peterson’s field guide to mushrooms indicates that these must be “splash-cup bird’s nests,” Cyathus stercoreus: the inside of the cups are smooth; the spore cases (peridioles) are dark and flattish; they’re growing on landscaping mulch, the cups are covered with a whitish membrane prior to opening, and immature cups can be kind of yellowish.

We found these critters growing in my parents’ front flower bed, opening their cheery little nesty-cups alongside the (somewhat shinier) petuneys.

Calling this type of fungus “bird’s nest” is fitting for more than just the cuteness factor (they look like little bird nests, don’t they!)—those round balls in the cups actually are, basically, the fungus’s “eggs,” the new generation, the precious offspring, hope for the future.

In the case of bird’s-nest fungi, raindrops disperse the spores when they hit into the cups, dislodging the round cases, which are somewhat sticky, which then adhere to nearby objects, such as plants.

The spore cases for at least one type of bird’s-nest fungus actually fly out of the cup, dramatically, as if they’ve been shot out of a cannon. You might have seen the aftermath of this when the little bitty sticky globs get adhered to the siding of your house, or on your car, leaving their empty nests behind.

Elio Schaechter, in his inspiring book In the Company of Mushrooms: A Biologist’s Tale (a book I could not live without), explains how the bird’s-nest fungus “gameplan” is a clever way to achieve dispersal. When a peridiole splashes or flies out of its cup and sticks to a nearby plant, there’s a decent chance that plant might be consumed by an herbivore.

Then, as with many “seeds” that get consumed by herbivores, the spores pass out of the animal’s gut in good shape. And it turns out that many of the bird’s-nest fungi feed on doo-doo, so there you go: dispersal, and then the first dinner, compliments of the chauffeur.

Miraculous, aren’t they? . . . What a wonderful world.

Heat + Moisture + The State Capitol’s Lawn

More photos from June 23, same day as previous post. It was a day for mushroom photography!

These are shaggy manes (Coprinus comatus) (I’m pretty sure that’s what they are—I really need a refresher course in basic mushroom identification. Or else I need to just do the work necessary to identify them correctly, since I’m so rusty—pull some up, take them apart, and seriously examine the structure, take measurements, make spore prints, etc. I’m mainly just lazy.)

These were growing in clusters in the southeast part of the capitol lawn, in a shady spot. Lord, I didn’t even take note of the surrounding trees! How observant.

But then we were distracted—the big Race Across America bicycle race was coming through Jeff City that evening, and we got completely sidetracked. Also, we were trying to get a little exercise, which my picture-taking was hampering. . .

So here are some more mushroom pictures for you. Plus a bonus shot of the Missouri State Capitol.

By the way, here’s a Web site that discusses the current revision of the “inky cap” mushrooms—it turns out that shaggy manes, for instance, are fairly closely related to the agarics (you know—that’s the large group of both poisonous and edible mushrooms that includes Agaricus bisporus, the “ubiquitous white button mushroom of the supermarket”).

Oh, another thing: that phrase about A. bisporus is sort of a recurring joke in the book In the Company of Mushrooms: A Biologist’s Tale, by Elio Schaechter (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997). I cannot recommend this book highly enough. It is informative as well as spirited as well as vastly entertaining. One minute, you’re learning amazing things about these magical little chemical factories, thinking “wow!”; the next, you’re laughing at some weird human-fungi interaction; and eventually, you’re feeling reference, awe, and gratitude for these amazing organisms.