Beginners guide to fungi identification. Part 1

It is that time of year again folks!!!

Mushroom time.




Yippee, everywhere gets filled with fungi. They pop up everywhere, the woods, the park, the sand dunes, tescos carpark, my facebook feed, twitter, the daily mail, you name it they are every where. They either fill people with delight, or if you read the daily mail with abject terror. I have being into fungi since I was twelve. I was a really geeky not very social teenager that loved long walks. A fly agaric caught my eye one day, it was in the poisons book I wanted for christmas. I pestered my mum, she bought me cooper johnsons guide to poisonous plants and buczacki field guide to british fungi. I was totally hooked on the impermanent beauty and the variably from deadly to delicious that the world of fungi has. I was about 17 before I felt confident enough to eat any, and even then it was puff balls that cant be confused with anything else.

I have taught fungi identification for several years. I have led numerous fungi walks and worked with the county recorder. At the moment I am taking a break from doing professional walks, as I find the preparation for them extremely stressful. The base of knowledge about fungi in the UK is very poor compared to other countries and there is a lot of misconception, and misinformation about fungi, when I start a walk I usually have to get those out of the way.

Here are the frequently asked questions I get

Can I get poisoned by touching a death cap

No. there are no European or North American fungi that can poison you by touching them. To identify a mushroom you need to pick it, look at the shape of the gills, the colour of the gills and how they meet the stem. Some family groups you even need to taste them or smell them. But no you can not get poisoned by touching a death cap, or any mushroom.

I have little brown mushrooms on my lawn, should I keep my three year old off the grass?

No. unless you cant trust your three old to not randomly eat bits of nature. There are very few little brown mushrooms are deadly poisonous, quite a few are hallucinogenic though. An adult would have eat quite few to get any effect from those. It is far better to educate a child to be knowledgeable and not scared of nature, like asking them to notice the difference between daises and dandelions and then doing the same exercise with the lawn fungi. You would be surprised how many different fungi grow on your lawn. Do a spore print, it is fun thing to do with even small children.

What is a spore print?

Lay a mushroom gill side down on a piece of paper for a few hours. The spores leave a pattern on the paper, the colour of which tells you which family group they are part of. When it comes to eating fungi once you have eliminated family groups like the web caps and the amanitas you have eliminated most of the most toxic fungi.



Here are three fungi I found in grass under the same tree, they look like the same species




But the spore print shows two white marks and one brown one.

The rusty brown spore print shows on the mushroom on the right shows it is totally unrelated to the other two fungi. All three look identical.

The spores print colours for the different family groups are as follows [simplified]
White ; dapperlings, amanitas, tricholomas, funnel caps, and wax caps.
white-cream; brittle gills, milk caps.
Mid Browns, orangy and red browns; fibre caps, webcaps, scaly caps, brick caps
Very dark browns-purply black; mottle-gills, field mushrooms, ink-caps

A couple species also have green and lilac spores. Most of the poisonings that occur are people eating species with mid brown spores, when they have mistook them for edible species. There are very few edible mushrooms with mid-brown spores, but there is quite a few deadly poisonous ones. A lot of people know that death cap has white gills and white spores, but the deadly webcap and the fools webcap actually poison more people, as they are a lot more common. The fungi with the brown spores in the picture is actually a type of webcap, if you look at the button mushroom on the far right you can just about make out little white fibres between the outer of the cap and the stems. That is the web, that is why they are called webcaps, this feature disappears though as the cap opens.

So Are edible fungi hard to identify?

No, not really. Most of the choice edible mushrooms are from a handful of very distinct groups, which are easy to identify once you know enough about fungi. There are quite a few like puffballs which can not be confused with anything else, which as long as they are solid white in the middle are edible. There are quite a few fungi without gills which are very edible and look nothing like anything toxic. Quite a few people just restrict themselves to a hand full of well known fungi such as boletes and field mushrooms, and don't learn any further. Most poisonings happen to people in this group however. I advise everyone first to get a decent field guide. I use a collins field guide, it has over 1,000 species covered. I also cross reference. Everyone that wants to collect gilled fungi for the pot should be able to identify fungi down to the 10 or so family groups, and be familiar with the different gill shapes and the different locations mushrooms grow on. A mushroom that grows on pasture and grassland will not be found on a pile of wood chip or on the side of a log.


HOW TO IDENTIFY A MUSHROOM AND NOT DIE.

Not dying is the easy bit: if you are not 100% on the identification of fungi don't eat it. You are not going to get ill by touching one.
Identifying is a bit more involved. You will need a good field guide, that organises species into various the families. Once you have your field guide do this.

1. Look what it is growing on; grass, grass with animal poop, dead tree live tree. I used to take painstaking field notes and label each fungi with a luggage label, now I simply photograph it, this way I have a record of what each fungi is growing on




these mushrooms are growing on grass, a mushroom that is growing in woodland that looks the same is most likely a different species.

2 Pick the mushroom and look underneath. If it is not an old grim looking maggoty mess, smell it. Take note if the smell is weird, like aniseed or engine oil. Most mushrooms smell like mushrooms however.

3. Look at the gills, The colour can vary from white to nearly black through various colours from purple to red. Some gills are thick plates that are far apart and some are thin and crowded together. The gills are by for the far the most important thing to look at.

The gills on this fungi are dark cream and a white liquid comes off the gills when they are broken.




These gills are brown, with black spores.

4.Tear the mushroom in half, smell it again, look to see if it changes colour. Some fungi turn red, bright yellow or even purpley black. Then most importantly look to see how the gills attach to the stem. A good field guide should have key with this feature in it. I will go through the different gill shapes in the next post and the different groups.



Both these mushrooms are funnel shaped, the top one discoloured orange then green when cut.

5. Do a spore print. Often you can see the colour of the spores by brushing them off the gills.

That is a simplified as a far a possible what to look for when you look at a mushroom, and you aren't going to die by touching them. look at the gills, what its growing on, any weird features and what does it smell like.

I simply want to enthuse people to learn about the natural world. I will go into further depth on the IDing the family groups on the next post, hopefully I have given enough information for people not to be scared, and not take either photos of UFOs, [unidentifiable fungal objects] expecting an ID or worse, clear an area of some random species and plop them on their table and post up "can I eat these". Get proper field guide and learn to use it if you are serious about collecting for the pot. This planet is being ruined by the idle, arrogant and greedy, dont by one of them. Foraging as whole brings us closer to nature, it is how we survived for most of our existence on this earth, it is important to relearn these lost skills. To learn to live in balance with nature, fungi offer a daring natural bounty, but only for the wise. Be patient to learn.