Thursday, January 3, 2008

Annual mushroom hunt draws foragers to Point Reyes


Volunteer mushroom hunters fanned across the Point Reyes peninsula in the morning mist last Saturday, taking part in the third annual Mycoblitz.

The goal was to find as many different types of fungus as possible – hopefully, some that have never been seen before.

“It’s like an Easter egg hunt for adults,” said Debbie Viess, who co-founded the Bay Area Mycological Society (BAMS) along with David Rust. “You never know what you’re going to find. There’s something new every day.”

Over 100 people gathered in the auditorium of the Bear Valley Visitors Center at the Point Reyes National Seashore (PRNS) before signing up to survey the mushrooms along one of 20 different routes. Men, women, and children of all ages came from as far away as Oregon to join an event designed in part to “turn people on to mushrooms.”
By 10 a.m. they had dispersed.

A group of 12 mushroom hunters carpooled to the summit of Mount Vision, where they spread into the forest, eyes on the ground and armed with collecting baskets and specimen labels.

Excited calls echoed back and forth through the pine trees: “Bolek found a blue-green Stropharia,” someone called, and later, “The girl in the red coat has an enormous hedgehog.”

The group would gather to admire each find, before meandering back into the trees and huckleberry bushes.

Amiable conversation ranged from how to tell whether you had found a tasty candy-cap or a toxic look-alike, to pickling edible ‘men on horseback’ in vodka.

Yellow lactarius, crimson amanitas and shiny maroon russulas piled up in baskets, each separately held in a wax-paper bag and marked with a label indicating where it was found, what it was growing on, and what plants were growing with it.

The first mycoblitz was organized in 2005 by Tom Bruns of UC Berkeley and David Rust of BAMS.

In addition to involving the public, the mycoblitz aims to provide a detailed inventory of mushrooms in the park. A sample of every species found is filed in a herbarium, and it’s DNA sequence is added to a database.

“The blitz improves our identifications, but also gives us a DNA database that we can then use for other types of ecological studies,” Bruns said.
In the North Bay area, mushrooms can be legally collected at the Point Reyes National Seashore, and Tomales Bay and Samuel P. Taylor State Parks, Rust said. Salt Point State Park in Sonoma County has the best hunting around.

Point Reyes is valuable because it is close to the urban center of the Bay Area, and the collection limits are generous – two gallons of edible mushrooms per adult per day.

A single extra mushroom is also allowed. “The one mushroom addition may sound silly unless its boletus season, and your one mushroom weighs like five pounds,” said Viess.

Bold and brilliant or small and drab, mushrooms come in an infinite variety. Shiny caps and stippled stalks bloom from logs, cow pies and the duff of the forest floor.

Describing the biology of a mushroom can be like narrating the plot of a science-fiction novel. The fungi are an overlooked branch of biology; a third kingdom of life that is neither plant nor animal but incorporates features of both.

They digest their food like animals, but are sessile like plants. Reproduction takes place in numerous and bizarre ways. The fungus Schizophyllum commune has 24,000 different sexual types (whereas most plants and animals only have two), Viess said.

Like apples on a tree, the familiar stalked buttons are just the fruits of a much larger organism. The body of the fungus grows hidden from view, a fragile tangle of filaments that weaves through soil, wood and things they can decompose and feed on. Certain mushrooms usually grow in association with a certain plant, or type of plants.

“To successfully hunt specific mushrooms you have to look under the right trees,” said Viess. ”For golden chanterelles you go to coast live oak. If you’re looking for an edible lactarius you go to the pines, and so on.”

The highlights of Point Reyes are seasonal; hefty and savory Boletus edulus, or porcini, are found under bishop pines in the fall. As winter progresses, black trumpet chanterelles and hedgehog mushrooms arrive. Spring brings more edible amanitas, and morels in wood-chip beds. Shaggy parasols can be found in the summer.

Mushrooms are fickle, sprouting in response to rainfall and temperature and perhaps other environmental cues we still don’t understand.

“It can be kind of a bait-and-switch,” Viess said. “You go out in a boom year like this and think, ‘wow what a fairyland!’ but then you come back next year and find nothing.”

The majority of mushroom hunters only care about the edible species, but BAMS formed with the goal of broadening that focus. “We’re about the art and science of mushrooms,” Viess said. “Celebrating them for their beauty and helping the people who do the science collect, collate and also educate.”

It will take a few months to compile a complete list of all the species that were found on Saturday. Thousands of mushrooms were brought back to the Red Barn at PRNS headquarters in Olema, and experts spent the weekend sorting through tables piled high with fungi.

Once the best sample of each species was saved, the long process of keying them using spore prints, literature and microscopes began. To date, 435 different species of fungus have been identified in four annual mycoblitzes. Bruns expects that up to 40 mushrooms that have never been identified in this area before were probably found last weekend.

“We found a genus that I’ve never seen before in my life,” said Bruns. “It’s a pretty obscure little thing that could easily be missed. It looks like a little purple jelly-like blob.”