Ruminating On 'Shrooms

Day 8: When my husband and I inherited his grandparents' small acreage on one of southwest Washington's prairies, we promptly dubbed it "Toadstool Acres" for the numerous varieties of mushrooms growing there. We had morels off the back step in spring, boletas throughout the yard, shaggymanes behind the root cellar, but most notable was the sheer number of Amanitas, especially A. muscaria, which is arguably the most recognizable mushroom in the world with its bright red cap and white spots. Hubby enjoyed daily rambles in our woods, and had noticed that deer seemed to be eating mushrooms with abandon, including the poisonous Amanitas. He asked me how they survived since, like us, deer are mammals. I told him, "I don't know, but I'm not eatin' deer liver. That's where all those toxins go." Since then, I've done my homework, and could give him two reasons: first, deer are ruminants. Their four-chambered stomachs process foods differently, and at least two of the chambers contain bacteria which break down the toxic alkaloids. Second, deer do not gorge on a single food. They are browsers, grazers, and therefore rarely (if ever) consume toxic doses, although amanita poisoning has occasionally been found in cattle.

Here at the foot of the Mountain, my yard also sprouts a fairly wide but different selection of 'shrooms, and again, the deer consume several species which would make a human sick. A few of the species currently fruiting in my yard include a blue-staining bolete (top left, blue-staining varieties cause reactions in some people), Stropharia ambigua (lower left, poisonous), Russula occidentalis (lower right, dubious) and LBMs (top right), those infamous Little Brown Mushrooms which are impossible to identify unless you're an expert, and risky to consume. As one wit put it, "All mushrooms are edible...once." And I'm still not going to eat deer liver (not that I would eat venison anyway).