On a crisp, clear Saturday morning, December the 20th, I went out for my last group mushroom walk of the calendar year. This walk was with the Upper Cape Naturalists Club, an informal group of naturalists from whom I’ve learned about spiders, dragonflies, darners, wasps, bees, and more since I joined the group in the late spring. This go around, I got to share my knowledge with the group as we looked for mushrooms at the Breivogel Ponds Conservation Area in Falmouth, MA. We h

Good evening, friends, Last Friday I went down to New York City to give a presentation to the New York Mycological Society on burn mushrooms of the northeast. On Saturday we all went out to look for mushrooms — not particularly burn mushrooms, but any and all fungi we could find. There were a lot of great mycologists on the walk and we found a variety of mushrooms that were not only new to me, but also new to New York City (as far as the club’s records go). The most explosive

Good evening, friends, Yesterday, the Cape Cod Mycological Society met in the Shawme-Crowell State Forest for quite a successful mushroom walk. We found black trumpets, which was quite a surprise for this time of the year because they’re typically a summer mushroom. Our hypothesis was that it was such a dry summer they weren’t able to grow until now (after we’ve finally had an abundance of rain), and it was better to fruit late in the fall than to miss a year of spore dispers

Late this summer, I found myself seated in a doctor’s office. Nothing was wrong with me per se (at least nothing above baseline); I was there to talk with Dr. Lindsay Chimileski about her naturopathic medicine practice, Hawthorn Holistic Health, in Hamden, CT. Lindsay is a doctor who prescribes mushrooms (not those kinds) to help patients treat lifestyle and health ailments. Lindsay first popped up on my radar when we would run into each other on the mushroom festival circuit

Good morning, friends, Last week we looked at the choice edible and highly coveted Matsutake , a mushroom that draws many foragers to the outer arm of Cape Cod every October. This week we turn our attention to the foragers’ second choice, Leccinum vulpinum . Brick Cap, Foxy Bolete, and Scaber Stalk are just a few of the common names tossed around for these robust, charismatic boletes (I chose the middle for the title because it’s provocative). A handful of folks were collecti

This week we’re opting for a treat of a mushroom, however finding them was a bit of a trick. A couple Sundays ago, the Cape Cod Mycological Society ventured out to the Cape Cod National Seashore in Wellfleet, MA to try and hunt down the coveted Matsutake (Tricholoma magnivelare).

Good morning, friends, This week’s mushroom comes to us from the sandy grasslands of Breivogel Ponds Conservation Area in Falmouth, MA. A sandy plain devoid of trees might not be an area where you’d expect to find tons of mushrooms, but the place was teeming with them after a nor’easter dropped over four inches of rain on us last week. The title of this article lists a few of the common names for these rather unsightly lumps, and Pisolithus arenarius doesn’t exactly roll off

Good morning, friends, This past Thursday, a group of amateur mycologists joined Dr. Erik Kiviat of Hudsonia Ltd. to look for mushrooms in a landscape where you might expect to find bodies instead. The New Jersey Meadowlands is an urban wetland ecosystem just a few miles west of Manhattan that serves not only as a home for roughly 300 species of birds, 50 species of fish, and an untold number of mushrooms, but also as a dump for the excesses of all the industrial (and organi

Good evening, friends, This week we’re looking at a fungus we found back in early September, but with all the forays and festivals in September, we haven’t taken the opportunity to focus on this species yet. Regardless, this will certainly go down as one of my favorite finds of the year. The entomopathogenic fungus, Ophiocordyceps stylophora , was barely visible as it poked through the moss that blanketed a decomposing log. Our friend from Utica, Rich Tehan , identified the s

Good evening, friends, This week’s mushroom is a fresh one. We found it just yesterday on a walk with the 300 Committee after some overnight rain. From above, the mushroom looks like any other LBM (little brown mushroom), but then you flip it over and the hairy, red stipe lets you know you’ve found the Hairy-stalked Gymnopus ( Gymnopus spongiosus ). Notice the hygrophanous caps that change color depending on the amount of water lost or absorbed. This can make identification

This past weekend the Northeastern Mycological Federation 48th Annual Samuel Ristich Foray took place at Camp Comstock in Ithaca, NY. It was a dry summer throughout the northeast, but that didn’t stop over 200 professional and amateur mycologists from convening to find as many mushrooms as possible.

On Wednesday I got back from a week of travel with my brother, Clem, in the Alsace region of France. We were there to attend a memorial service and cairn dedication for my great-great uncle, Richard Nelville Hall. He died on Christmas morning, 1915, at the age of 21, when the ambulance he drove for the American Field Service was hit by a German shell in Moosch, France. I wouldn’t be able to talk about the mushrooms we found if I didn’t first tell his story.

We just wrapped up another Friends of Fungi weekend at Menla Retreat and Spa in the Catskills. We didn’t find a plethora of edible mushrooms, the results of a dry August, but we did find plenty of interesting fungi in a variety of different forms.

I spent the past weekend in Litchfield, CT at the 45th Annual Clark Rogerson Foray, hosted by the Connecticut-Westchester Mycological Association (COMA). Though I grew up in Connecticut and recently lived in Westchester, this was my first time attending the Labor Day weekend foray. I have a feeling it won’t be my last.

My desert journey began where the Telluride Mushroom Festival ended.

I just got back from a week in the mountain west where I spent the majority of the time — Tuesday through Sunday — in Telluride, Colorado for the Telluride Mushroom Festival.

Good evening, friends, This Saturday I was back down in New York for a wedding (congratulations Charlie and Claire) and got to catch up...