Mushrooms

Now that the season is coming to a close in the Chicago area, I’d like to compile some photos from the three mushroom hunting trips that I embarked on with several friends in the past month. These photos all come from the same forest in Michigan.

I am still amazed at how much a forest environment can change from week to week, especially after a heavy rain.  During both our first and second forays at this location, we encountered several logs covered in rows and rows of oyster mushrooms. The third time, however, we were surrounded by honey mushrooms on the ground; to my dismay the oysters were completely gone – either shriveled up to an unrecognizable mass, taken, or eaten by animals, most notably slugs. We even visited some of the same logs and found various dramatic changes, including new growths and species we hadn’t seen the first time around. One example of this change was the unfolding of pholiota clusters shown in the sequence of two photographs below.

Some of the highlights of these three forays included climbing steep muddy inclines in rain ponchos during a serious downpour, treading across streams of water with the help of fallen logs, eating wild grapes, finding tree carvings from the early 1960’s, and coming across this thing. At first we thought it was a branch of cottony seeds moving around in the wind. Upon closer examination we discovered the tiny legs – these were dancing aphids! I had never seen anything like it. We also came across a beautiful lime green caterpillar.

I learned several new mushroom and slime mold names: lion’s mane, wolf’s milk, shaggy scalycap, brick top… nothing like the most memorable mushroom name of all: destroying angel. That one is forever etched in my memory. I also learned that enoki is orange, not white, when it has a chance to grow in broad daylight. It is also more commonly proportioned when it grows freely (not in an elongated tube). The enoki we found are in the third photograph below:

Our last foray was probably the most memorable one. We met a fellow mushroom hunter from Lithuania who carried a large basket full of honey mushrooms. Having never eaten honey mushrooms, I picked a few and took them home, finding both the flavor and texture relatively disappointing. I chose not to take any of the accompanying gnarly cannibal mushrooms called “aborted entoloma.” These are fungi that completely devour their host honey mushrooms until no trace is left. I didn’t even take any pictures of these things; they were that hideous… Of course, as it turns out, the aborted entolomas were the delicious ones. Richard was nice enough to save me one.

We came across several trees covered in small clusters of hericium that were growing several feet above reach. This was a fun part of the foray; having remembered that the late mushroom hunter Eileen once told me about how she attached a knife to a stick, I created a mushroom-reaching contraption using my swiss army knife, a hair accessory, and some rubber bands. We took turns trying to reach the hericium until one of us sliced it and it fell to the ground. It was such a beautiful mushroom that I decided to photograph one of the lowest growing specimens with my pinhole camera. The task required a priority mail envelope as a reflector.

Our final few steps just as we were leaving the woods were greeted by a small snake that found its way to the middle of the path. Luckily, Leon spotted it before any of us stepped on it. I don’t think I’d ever seen any snakes in the upper Midwest prior to this moment. The snake seemed eerily out of place in the woods.