Mon - February 7, 2005Hobo JoeForever an hour ahead of me on every mushroom
walk I've ever taken. Does he ever sleep?
It's a great day for a mushroom hike -- recent
rain but firm ground, sun filtering down through the trees, early morning. The
barely visible trail takes me deep into the woods, into ground that I'm certain
will be perfect for exotic and prized finds.
The trail breaks into a clearing of slightly canted, well-drained but moist ground. The dappled light is so gorgeous I feel like kissing myself. I might be the first person in this clearing in a week. Maybe I'm the first one ever. At least that's how it feels. And then I see the tracks: two-inch holes in the leaf bed, exposing bare soil and a few thread of mycelium. There's one, there's two, there's...twelve. A little bit of rummaging through the leaves reveals a single sad bolete or maggoty chanterelle, too small for a proper ID, much less for collection. I have to assume that the twelve holes had once been filled with beautiful specimens of the same species. Someone else got to them first. (It's never long ago: You can tell how long a hole has been in loose soil by tapping the ground nearby. If crumbs of soil settle, then it's only been a few hours. Even the dew cycle overnight will generally cause loose soil to settle. Call me Aragorn.) We gave him a name, so that we could curse it: Hobo Joe. Every time, every perfect walking day, he's just ahead, getting the best and most prized specimens. Sometimes he leaves broken stems or caps of imperfect carpophores, just in case we missed the less obvious signs. I don't know much else about him. He has no life; he never rests; he eats well... ...and he'd better hope I never catch up. Posted at 10:44 AM Thu - February 3, 2005Required gearAny list of the essential items one must take on
a mushroom walk...
...must include toilet
paper.
Any list that is prioritized by the paradigm "Of what item, if I need it and don't have it, will I most feel the lack?"... ...must start with toilet paper. You're lucky that I'm not telling you the story. Posted at 09:23 AM Sat - January 1, 2005Launch Entry"To boldly go out into damp fields, find and
identify fungi, and quite possibly eat
them."
Ten bucks and a free T-shirt to the first person who can translate that into graceful Latin. Largely as a result of the near-spastic energy
and logistical legerdemain of my friend and former colleague Jess Leber,
I've been out mushrooming a few times in the past few months. (Despite the fact
that we both used to be yeast biologists, our love of fungus is mostly culinary
and secondarily aesthetic, rather than strictly scientific -- certainly it's
true that some of the fungi of scientific interest have lousy, even frightful,
reputations.)
It's been a lot of fun: There's something very peaceful about going into the woods and looking for the subtle quiet things of the world, what one famed mycologist calls All That the Rain Promises. After we go out, we return home to look at our digital pictures and the occasional sample that we take with us. I've been amazed by the challenge of identifying the mushrooms that we find -- even with the use of excellent books and the (dubious) intellectual power of two biology Ph.D.'s, we can identify far less than half of what we find. So the idea for Mycoblog emerged largely as an idea about how to train people (meaning, mostly, ourselves) about how to identify mushrooms. My plan is to post images of the mushrooms we find, along with descriptions of the locations in which we find them, and share our thoughts with the sprawling mycological blogosphere. If you think we could do a better job of making ID's, let us know. Eventually, we hope to have forums up, so that readers can publicly post about images and discuss issues pertaining to amateur mycology and mushroom identification. The ultimate dream is to move to a real server and set up a system that would allow users to post their own images -- even from the field -- and benefit from the expertise of the world mycological community. But, you know, baby steps. Posted at 10:06 AM |