August is usually a painful month for wildlife photographers and
naturalists who spend their time in the hills and dales of the
northeast. This year has been no exception with rain, heat and humidity
soaring. Animals tend to restrict their home ranges in order to protect
themselves from over taxing their metabolic requirements. In extreme
cases a species might even aestivate (summer hibernation) to assure that
the scales of activity to fat stores are not affected.
There is one group of
organisms that excel under the otherwise confining conditions of moisture,
heat and humidity – they're called fungi. If you’ve spent anytime outside
this summer you’ve probably noticed some of them right under your feet
while mowing the lawn or shooting a round of golf. The multitudinous
varieties of fruiting bodies this Kingdom of organisms has to offer are all
indispensable minions in Mother Nature’s bag of tricks. Without them were
screwed. Who’d a thought that the same group of organisms that cause
athletes foot, the great famine of 1846 in Ireland and the chestnut blight
also provide us with food, drugs and fibers. Every tree in the forest needs
fungi to help in the uptake of nutrients via a portion of their anatomy
called mycorrhiza. This symbiotic association between fungus and the roots
of trees is a monumental relationship without equal for life on earth. The
planet would be devoid of most of its floras without this mycorrhizal
association
Every time I set my
eyes on a mushroom I remind myself that the bird won’t sing, the butter
won’t fly and the frog won’t jump without them. Life can’t exist without
the process of decay catalyzed by fungi. The boundless shapes and forms
they come in play a quintessential role in this process. They feast on
everything organic – from synthetic paint, body tissue to the tough
cellulose walls of plants – breaking everything down to a form where
microbes can take the ball and run with it. The net result of all this
decomposition is the freeing up of nutrients so that plants can use them
in order to start the cycle a new.
This year the stars
aligned if you were a mycologist. Spring and summer rains have expedited
the ability for the basic filamentous (threadlike) component of fungi to
expand to form mycelium. When groups of this mycelium become bunched
together we notice its manifestations as mushrooms under our feet. Even
the inveterate naturalist can easily be perplexed at the endless shapes
and forms this group presents. Many still have yet to receive common names
which mean you are forced to learn the Latin nomenclature. To identify
some you must take the time to make spore prints of their caps or cut them
in half for internal inspection.
The anatomical terminology must also be
mastered because most key guides use esoteric language to describe them.
Adding insult to injury is the pictures you see in field guides that
depict mushrooms in their mature fruiting forms. In the real world you
will find mushrooms in all stages of development.
If you can muddle through the process the rewards can be great for you’ll be
surprised at how many species growing in your own back yard can become food on
your plate. Morels, truffles, oyster mushrooms and the self explanatory chicken
of the woods all are choice favorites and surprisingly common. The problem with
mushrooms and edibility is that theirs no margin for error. Imagine my fright
this month when I came very close to tasting Lactarius Piperatus, which I
thought I keyed out with a hundred percent accuracy only to find out that the
identical looking Russula Brevipes was the edible look-a-like. The highly
poisonous Lactarius fruits under hardwood trees – where I found it, Russula
Brevipus is found under conifers – oooopps!!
Had I taken a taste you all would
be watching reruns of Seinfeld wondering what happened to Blaine’s Blaine's Naturalist Narratives. The only thing separating me and early retirement was where I found the
shroom. The lesson to be learned is that you can’t go by an artists drawing or a
photograph to key out a species. With mushrooms habitat becomes a crucial piece
to the puzzle.
No matter what your perception is of mushrooms you can’t deny the beauty they
impart to any woodland setting. I’ve bore witness to the eerie glow of the
bioluminescent jack-o-lantern mushroom and the middle-earthian growth of the
“horn of plenty” but I’m still waiting in anxious anticipation to set my eyes on
a violet webcap or the star-trekian form of a collared earth star. It’s the
“what’s behind curtain number two” mystery of it all that keeps us naturalists
penetrating deeper into woods.
| 
