No Old, Bold Mushroomers

Day 5: It's often said that there are old pilots and bold pilots, but no old, bold pilots. The same is true of mushroomers. While no experienced mushroom hunter would confuse these two fungi, an over-enthusiastic beginner might easily do so with unpleasant, even tragic results. That's a puffball on the left, good eating if picked before the interior starts to turn brown. On the right is a young Amanita muscaria, your classic "toadstool," dangerously poisonous.

There are a number of edible and choice "beginner" mushrooms, but even those may sometimes prove challenging to novice collectors. I used to go out chanterelle-picking with my fishing buddy and his brother-in-law. The brother-in-law knew his stuff, and often came home with his basket full of things I didn't feel I could confidently identify. On the other hand, although he and I had showed the third member of our team the chanterelle's characteristic veins (as opposed to gills), we invariably had to sort through his gleanings to remove Galerina autumnalis (poisonous) and anything else which just happened to be orange. Sometimes, we just discarded the whole lot out of concern for cross-contamination.

While there is no scientific difference between a "mushroom" and a "toadstool" (it's only semantic), knowing whether a species is edible, poisonous or just not worth the bother is a crucial distinction when harvesting mushrooms from the wild. Be "105%" sure when you pick. You might not get a chance to say, "Well, I guess I was wrong about that one."