On identifying mushrooms

A few years back, Laurie and I spent part of a summer in a cabin in the BC interior, near Chase. We had electricity and water, but no phone, not even cell coverage. No TV, no radio, no computer. We spent hours scrambling through the bush, exploring. It is dry, scratchy territory; mixed forest, lichens, dead branches. In the clearings, prickly weeds, rocks and more lichen. My legs, in shorts because of the heat, were covered in scratches.

Along the road, the puffballs were plentiful, though small for eating. And we found the occasional shaggy mane, also edible. Laurie wasn't into eating wild mushrooms, though, so I left them to rot on the ground. On the dead wood everywhere, turkey tail and the like grew in rows. On the side hill, I found blobs of orange jelly, and artist's conk. Laurie collected a huge one for me; I still have it on top of my bookcase.

We went back again at the end of the summer, to close up the cabin for the winter. Now it was cold, and raining most of the time. We had work to do outside, so we ventured into the bush with raingear and boots. And found the woods full of mushrooms, of all sorts, all imaginable colours, all sizes. Slimy yellow ones, small and large. Slimy brown, pink, plum-coloured. Boletes, yellow and brown. Russulas. Coral mushrooms in huge clumps. Tiny yellow tongues and clubs sticking out of the soil. Rows and rows of tiny puffballs on the stumps. Insect egg slime, yellow and red. And the normal "mushroom" mushrooms, the tiny umbrella-shaped ones that fairies dance around.

And "tree mushrooms". Well, not really. Something, maybe squirrels, maybe some of the local birds (nuthatches, chickadees, Clark's nutcrackers) was harvesting the boletes and taking them up into the trees, where we would see them, half-eaten, wedged into the crotch of branches.

I collected samples, oodles of samples. After dark, back in the cabin, warm and fed, I examined them, took spore prints, dissected and measured them. And squinted at them through my hand microscope, with the aid of a flashlight (there was no appropriate lamp). Made detailed notes: texture, smell, hairy or non-hairy, scaly or smooth, pores or gills, gills attached, semi- or non-, wide or narrow, veiled or non-v, rings?, cup? ... And on and on. Then, for hours, I pored through my Field Guide to Mushrooms, trying to identify them.

And I learned something valuable. That identifying mushrooms is not an occupation for amateurs. That it is better just to take them as they are, to delight in them when they spring into view - in such unexpected places! and forms!, to learn about their life, hidden and public, but not to intellectualize them; it's impossible. Even for the experts, it's difficult.

The Guide tells me, about the Basidiomycetes, the largest division of mushrooms,

"Classification of classes, orders, families, genera and species within this subdivision is determined partly by the method of spore dispersal, partly by the size, shape, surfce and color of the spores, and partly by the response of the basidia and spores to chemical reagents. Field examination of the mushrooms is important but often insufficient to determne identification with certainty."

On another page, it reccommends carrying a microscope on collecting expeditions!

Maybe Laurie is wise not to eat wild 'shrooms. Be that as it may, I am content to discover them in the wild, exclaim over them, photograph them, maybe dry a few. I skim through my Guide now and again, to get a general idea of what I'm looking at; it helps me to notice features I might have passed over, unappreciated.

But I really don't need to know "the response of the basidia and spores to chemical reagents."

What we found in the Watershed park will have to wait until tomorrow. I'm going to bed.

(And here's one of my dried mushrooms; a happy feller.)