Morels from April

Okay, yes, I found morels, it was two months ago, that’s how far behind I am because if I don’t post in a timely manner I just keep hiking and taking more pictures and this is what happens.

Everybody who hunts mushrooms and/or takes nature pics and/or has a blog has probably posted about morels, so I'm under a lot of pressure to think of how to make it interesting, but I did capture a few images that I thought were worthy of taking up space on the internet.

Here is the tiniest morel I’ve ever seen:

I went back a few days later, expecting it to have shot up to “beer can” size (apparently that’s an industry standard for describing how big your morel is), but it had hardly budged. So I got curious, having seen many other mushrooms grow at a furious rate in mere days (like they're known for), and I found some things like a pretty bad YouTube time-lapse video of some morels growing (bad because it was really a slide-show, which is cheating, with clever, spinning “fun” shots sprinkled in, and many shots with nothing to compare the size to, and there was goofy music), but appreciated nonetheless because I hadn't taken the time to do that, and I sure didn't know morels take up to a month to get full-sized…

*Edit*  Soon after I posted this, one of my faithful followers, the wise and lovely Maxine Stone, kindly took the time to email me this:

"Hi Lisa:
I think this is a Morchella deliciosa.  These are small morels and the ridges are more like lines that go up and down as you can see in the pic.  They are usually grayish but this one looks old."

So I thought this was just a very, very young Morchella esculenta, but it is, in fact, a different species. These don't ever get "beer-can sized," they top out at about 3". And besides the ridges having more "verticality," for lack of a better word, I would probably notice the stems, which seem to be generally more slender, and less gnarly than the common M. esculenta.

I sure am glad that people who have been at this a lot longer than me are actually reading this blog! Thanks again, Maxine.

Here is the most beautiful morel I found all season:



These are called “greys” on the street but it’s a “Classic North American Yellow Morel”, Morchella esculenta (near as I can tell, from this site). I loved how the pits were so dense, making it extra-crinkly, and the luminous moon-color around the dark pits. This would eventually turn blonde-yellow.

Even though this morel almost looks black-and-white, which seems like it would show up easily against new green growth and last year's brown leaves, it was very, very hard to see. Because it was a morel. And they just pop into this dimension when they feel like it. Sometimes it seems like they’re made more of shadows than solid matter.

 
The beautiful grey again, and a blonde and grey in hand. Same species.


Above, some morels that have offered themselves to me to eat, waiting patiently.

I hiked many, many times this spring, found enough morels to share, and one night fried a whole bunch of them in seasoned breadcrumbs and couldn’t stop eating them as soon as they were cool enough to put in my mouth so they never filled the plate and then I felt a little sick, but I think it was from eating too much, and not me developing a sensitivity to them (which can happen with any food), which would be fine with me because there’s a lot of anxiety around morels, everybody trying like hell to figure out what triggers their arrival and where’s the best place to find them, and all this protocol and etiquette and stories and legends (and sometimes bad feelings), when chanterelles are so plentiful and easy to find and sweet and delicious and can come up for months. But, it’s usually cool and pretty out when you go morel-hunting, and there’s all the other small waking-up forest citizens around, so all is well.

Parrot Waxy Cap

Here's a little leftover sweetheart (Hygrocybe psittacina) from an earlier hike (Sept. 26th). It's one of the ones I'd been hoping to find, because, well, they're beautiful, especially when young.

I wasn't at all sure of what these were at first, seeing a troupe of vaguely-orange, small shiny mushrooms, until I poked around a little more and found the just-emerging green ones (below). That color made it pretty unmistakable.

They start out this wonderful parrot-green color (there's another one in the background, the cap was just starting to poke out), then fade to olive-yellow, then orange. They're "decidedly slimy" (to quote Michael Kuo), and get barely 3" tall. This one was about an inch. 

How do they push their way out of the soil without getting completely covered with stuff stuck all over them? And what IS that slime, anyway? What's it FOR? Or maybe that's WHY they come out of the soil without stuff stuck all over them--they're so slick nothing can stick. They're not sticky, after all, they're slimy. Big difference. Anyway, that's them, straight out of the camera, in all their charming, parrot-green, slimy splendor.

Black Trumpets (finally!)

Craterellus something--fallax, cornucopioides, I don't know which, there's some taxonomy games going on about these. And I don't have a microscope.

I've been dying to find some of these, after reading about how hard they are to find, how intense the flavor becomes when they're dried, how great it tastes to flavor wine with them by dropping a few in the bottle and leaving it overnight, how crazily expensive they are, etc. So much intrigue! I did find a tiny handful of them in the spring, but then it all looked pretty discouraging. But then me an' Rob were hiking around recently, and we wanted to go up there to check out that big dead tree, and suddenly they were everywhere. I froze, and yelled "TRUMPETS! Black Trumpets! Oh my gawd, they're everywhere!"

There's at least 20 in the image above. They're about 2" tall.

These are nice and dark because they're nice and wet because it had rained nice and hard the day before, but I'm telling you, these things shift between dimensions or something. You don't see them, and then suddenly you see them. And if they're not conveniently darkened from recent rain, they are EXACTLY the color of a dead leaf:

Here's me, for some perspective:

Anyway, we happily picked them for about an hour, I was thrilled, we got 3-4lbs of them, and oooh, when you've got a whole bunch of them together in a bag, the smell is intoxicating, if you like the smell of sweet, gamy, mushroomy earthy things.

Then a fellow mushroom freak reported finding some over where he hunts, and he picked 9 lbs one day, 7 lbs another day, 11 lbs another day...he said he thought there might be "hundreds of thousands" of them. Incredible.

Then I read some stuff about them, and learned (as much as you can call it "learning" from reading a single blurb on a commercial website) that 12 lbs fresh make one lb dry, which explains something about why they're so pricey. They are very thin-fleshed, it's not like you can really get a good chewy mouthful of them, they're more about flavor (which gets stronger when you dry them). I threw what I thought was kind of a lot (of fresh ones) into a pan (w/ butter of course), and they went "Shp!" and shrunk down to nothing in 2 seconds. Smelled wonderful, though, and what there was of them tasted wonderful. REALLY smelled wonderful.

Then there was no more rain and the whole world dried up. 

Bearded Tooth in my backyard!

In my back yard!!!

I drove into the little parking area in back, turned off the engine and sort of idly noticed that there was a new section of fence over there, and there it was, a lovely little Hericium erinaceus just sitting there in the tree next to the storage shed. It's an urban area, I tell you! Lots of college students in rented houses. House/driveway/house/driveway neighborhood.

Not a house in the country

That white dot on the tree is it

In my backyard!

About the size of a nice orange.

It was in my back yard! When I saw it, I felt like I just realized I was holding a winning lottery ticket. You may think I exaggerate, but I do not.  I wish I understood why I find it such a thrill to find choice edible mushrooms. I can't even think of what to compare it to. I wouldn't necessarily say it's the absolute best feeling I've ever had, but there is something kind of addictive about it. Someone should do a study.

You know why I found this in my back yard? I'll tell you why. It's because mushrooms are everywhere, that's why.

More mushrooms, Sept. 25 foray assortment

Hygrocybe sp.

A Waxy Cap. This one is unusually pristine, as they are often wet and a little slimy so they almost always have stuff stuck to them.



I don’t know what this is, but I know what I like, and I like this.

Whatever this mushroom is, it’s about 5-6” across, and has beautiful ruffles and scallops. It looks like suede, draped over something rounded. Now I'm kicking myself for not examining it even more closely. What were the gills like? What about the view from below?

I have to admit that I often get so enchanted with the shapes and colors that I lose interest in finding out what they are. I probably shouldn’t say that out loud.
*Edit: I hardly ever do that anymore so I don't have to kick myself later.

Laccaria amethystina

This luscious purple mushroom is not very common around here. Too bad.



A young puffball, Lycoperdon echinatum. Before I knew about these I had assumed they were L. perlatum, but the whole surface is covered with short hairs, not organized little knobs like L. perlatum.

Also, I found some morels, but I didn't care

The morels I found on this day were pretty much overshadowed by the emerging Polyphemus moth I found.

Still, my first love is mushrooms.

Grisette--Amanita vaginata--and Clavulinopsis laeticolor

"Grisette," Amanita vaginata.

 Common name refers to a French working-class woman, usually a part-time "flirt;" from "gris" (grey), the color of the cheap unbleached clothing they wore.
Anyway, these mushrooms have characteristic striated cap edges, a ring and a nice volva.
Bonus: this photo appears in Michael Kuo's latest book, "Mushrooms of the Midwest"!











Tiny orange coral, probably Clavulinopsis laeticolor.

Purple Russula & Fat Coral Mushroom

Lovely coral fungus, Ramaria sp.













Russula mariae (best guess). Russulas are not easy to identify without checking a lot of different features, none of which I was aware of when I found this.

Destroying Angel and Common Split-gill

Schizophyllum commune, "common split-gill" (very young ones)

Amanita bisporigera, "Destroying Angel." Most field guides call this A. virosa (or A. verna, depending on whether or not it turns yellow when KOH is applied), but those turn out to be European species. 

Amanita bisporigera's large ring on stem

Netted Rhodotus and old Laccaria

 

Netted Rhodotus, Rhodotus palmatus

Something else, I'd say an old Laccaria ochropurpurea

Boletes and Tremella fuciformis with Ophiostoma epigloeum

Lumpy Bolete
Dimpled cap points to Leccinum, maybe.
 














Another bolete, slowly bruising blue

Little jelly (about 1-1/2")

Tremella fuciformis.

See the little black spines? That's a parasitic fungus that only grows on T. fuciformis. I don't remember how I chanced upon that bit of information. I learned it as Ophiostoma epigloeum, apparently now it's Sporothrix epigloea.

Chanterelle motherlode!

HUGE field of chanterelles. Every orange spot you can see is another one. Goes to edge of frame.
Click for life-sized experience.
 

Black-footed polypore, Polyporus badius

Didn't know what these were for a while. They were pliable, and BIG. Underside white and smooth.
Polyporus badius.
These change appearance pretty dramatically over the course of their lives, very young ones are pale grey with a smooth rounded outline, from a distance they look like oyster mushrooms. They turn a dark reddish brown as they mature.

Laetiporus cincinnatus looks just like cooked chicken

 















NOT chicken, chicken of the woods MUSHROOM!

The hunt and capture of the chicken of the woods

Top two images are first day; bottom is next day.

Found this sitting there under a tree in a park, minding its own business (as far as I could tell). This very choice edible, this Laetiporus cincinnatus ("chicken of the woods"). Ran home to get positive ID (this is kind of funny now, as it is considered one of the easiest for beginners to ID. Now I would know in one second, but this really was in the very first month of my mushroom fascination, and the first one I'd ever seen). Positively identified it, it was quite a young specimen, went back the next day to nab it (after hardly being able to sleep, worrying that someone else would find it) and I was horrified to find the park swarming with hundreds of people for some event, was sure someone would have messed with it. But I could see this sucker from the parking lot, because it was so big, and so luminous. I snuck up on it and cut it. I don't understand why no one else seemed to have seen it, or kicked it, or picked it. I've got a picture of it from about 200' away, looking like a plastic milk bottle or a grocery bag in the distance.

As they get older they start to flare out into more shelf-like fans, and they get dry and woody, so you can really only eat the outer edges. Not my problem.

Although it seemed to be growing from the grass, it was actually attached to an underground root; these always grow on wood (not logs--trees with some life still in them).

Sauteed, not mushroomy at all, a completely new flavor. Great meaty texture.

Risotto w/ mushroom & gorgonzola--I died.

Did I mention it weighed over 2-1/4 pounds? Well, it did. And that's a small one--I've seen pictures of HUGE growths of them, "over 30 lbs," they say.

Coral Mushroom--Ramaria

A beautiful coral mushroom, about 6" tall. It's a Ramaria, but since I posted this over 10 years ago I've learned it's not so easy to ID Ramaria to species without microscopy. 

Purple gills--Laccaria ochropurpurea

This is one of the very first mushrooms I photographed. I didn't know what the hell I was looking at.

Aug. 29, 2009

It is Laccaria ochropurpurea, an old one. Young fresh ones have a cap like what you think a mushroom cap looks like.

This was the fateful day that I fell in love with mushrooms, my camera, and macro-nature photography. I was being taken to a spot where a friend had discovered chanterelles--as in, he had found some, didn't know what they were, looked them up, found they were choice edibles, picked some, ate some, and was taking me with him to pick more--and as we scouted them out, so many other mushrooms began to reveal themselves that I just didn't know how to act. They were everywhere. How many other times in my life of considering myself a nature-girl had I been hiking and somehow not seen them? Crazy. Just goes to show, you see what you're looking for.

I found many, many more of these throughout the season.

Below, why you shouldn't use your flash up close. Bleah.

Later I found there's a setting to back down the intensity of the flash (RYFM = Read Your F---ing Manual), but still, I've never been happy with the results. It seems to take away from the intimacy of the subject. It's a point-and-shoot camera, so my control is limited (not to disparage my camera--I love that thing--the worlds it has shown me--). But my future holds a different camera...