I found this nice patch of Wine Caps (Stropharia rugosoannulata) alongside a trail yesterday. These are one of the first large gilled mushrooms to appear in the spring and with the recent rain, they certainly appeared.
One of the things that's great about most mushrooms is how different they can look over the course of just a few days... or even just a few hours. This is one of the reasons people get so flummoxed when trying to ID mushrooms. In the picture above, you have a fairly "classic" look of the fruiting body - stocky stem, rounded cap, a few nicks and gouges where something's taken a bit (not me!). When we see mushrooms in this stage it's easy to forget that they can also look like -
Wow! That's quite a difference. The once-rounded, bun-like cap flattened, and then began to upturn. What you're now looking at was once the UNDERSIDE of the mushroom. Those blackish crevices are the gills which are usually tucked up inside the cap. Though you can't see it very well, the color of the cap has changed too. Once a brick red, dark brown has lightened to tan.
Notice the ring around the stem. A good ID feature of a Wine Cap. Also, just at the upper edge of the ring is often a dark horizontal line. The spores, as you can imagine from the photo, are a dark purplish brown or purplish black.
Mushrooms are not much like birds. Usually when you see one bird, the others of that species look the same as adults, and by gender. Not so much with mushrooms.
And of course mushrooms tend to sit still.
For more info on Wine Caps, check out MushroomExpert.com
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