Mushroom Season 2010 Begins

Sorry for the long delay in posts. I think it'll be a little easier now that the mushrooms have started to appear.

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

ID Basics: Gills vs. Pores

So I thought I'd start a little ongoing series on identification basics and hints. Trying to ID by looking at photos online certainly doesn't compare to being out in the field but there are some easy techniques that you can still look at.

One of the first features I examine when finding mushrooms, even before color, shape, size, or habitat, is what is located on the underside of the "top" of the mushroom. The top could be the cap on a cap-and-stem mushroom, or the protruding "shelf" of a polypore.

GILLS

Okay, so you've turned over your mushroom (or you've taken out a telescoping mirror and have positioned it under the mushroom - - ummm... yes, I have been actually been known to do this to avoid picking it... let's move on, shall we?) and you see all these usually straight, line-like ridges, extending from the stem to the edge of the mushroom. Congratulations, you have found gills as shown in this Tricholomopsis. Picture the straight lines of fish gills.

Most mushroom field guides will further break down characteristics of gills. Are they decurrent? Adnate? Adnexed? Free? Are the distances between the gills equal? Forked? Radiating? We'll look at those characteristics at some point down the line.

PORES

So you're looking at your mushroom and you don't have gills. Instead you see what appears to be the surface of a sponge (like on this Bitter Bolete pictured). Some of these small "holes" may require a hand lens to see. Many mushrooms will have easily visible, larger holes. These are pores. Picture the pores of your own skin. In the case of mushrooms, the pores are the ends of tiny tubes that extend through the cap, not just a random smattering of holes on the surface. The vast majority of Boletes have these tubes/pores. Further characteristics of pores can be examined when identifying a mushroom, including the bruising of these pores (which can turn color, further helping to establish the species you have) but we'll get into this later.

If you can differentiate between gills and pores, you've made a great leap forward in ID'ing your mushroom. In both cases this is the part of the mushrooms where the reproductive spores are produced.

To complicate things just a bit, there are features other than gills and pores you might find, including gill-like veins, teeth/spikes, and a huge array of characteristics that are more common to mushrooms that are not cap-and-stem mushrooms or polypores, like stinkhorns, puffballs, sac fungi, etc. But gills and pores will be the major features on most of the mushrooms you find while out and about.

NEXT TIME: In the next ID Basics, we'll take a closer look at those outliers such as veins, teeth, spikes and a few others in ID Basics: Hep! It's not a gill or pore!