Finding Fall Fungi

 by Beth Sullivan

Glistening purple gems

As we wind down summer and gardens are going to fruit and seeds, it is also the season of the Mushroom!  I can never get through this season without renewing my sense of wonder at the variety and resiliency of these organisms. Fungi fans are seeing the amazing results of all the rains we have had through the summer and early fall. These are the perfect conditions for the explosion of mushrooms we are seeing now.

As most people know, there are mushrooms that are considered edible and very desirable delicacies. There are also a huge number that are inedible and many that are actually deadly.    Mushroom hunting for food is to be undertaken only by the knowledgeable.   The rest of us can hunt with our cameras.

Look around your yard even, there are numerous small capped mushrooms that pop up after a rain.  In the darker, damper woods, they are present on the forest floor and on dead wood stumps throughout the late summer and early fall.

Like fairy umbrellas

Fungi are in a Kingdom of their own. They are not plants at all, and surely they are not animals, but you would be surprised at some of their characteristics.  They do not have true roots, or a vascular system, or flowers and seeds. They contain no chlorophyll so are unable to make their own “food” utilizing nutrients and sunlight. Have you noticed there are no real GREEN mushrooms?   They rely on obtaining their nutrients from the decay process that they are part of on the forest floor, within all the dead plant material that is present there. They absorb their food through this process, rather than eating it or making it.  Mushrooms are actually the visible, spore producing bodies of a largely underground network of rhizome threads that comprise a fungus.  The spread of the rhizomes extends great distances but only one or two mushrooms may emerge. In other cases, many will pop up in the same area.

 Some are very specific, dependent for their survival on certain species of living trees, dead trees, or in soil with very narrow ranges of pH, soil acidity.  But here’s a fun fact:  the outer tough skin of many mushrooms is made of Chitin, which is the same material as the shells of lobsters and crabs!  Strange organisms.

They are called turkey tails for 
a good reason!

Along with a wide variation in color, they also take many forms: the familiar umbrella, ruffles, shelves, “turkey tails” and puffballs.  If you have ever come upon a solid white ball on your lawn and think “Golf ball”, experiment a little. A firm young puffball will be white all the way through and have a pleasing earthy smell. But wait a few weeks and find a puffball that has become browner with age. A touch with your toe or a flick of the finger will make it “puff”, explode with fine black dust, which is all the spores contained within. All mushrooms reproduce by releasing dusty spores and the color and patterns of those spores, when collected and inspected, are essential identification traits.

Have a child draw 
them in a sketch
book - by Emerson

These first weeks of October are perfect for hiking, and perfect for mushroom hunting.  The Great Avalonia Trail Trek will be happening soon. Saturday Oct 16 through Sunday Oct 24. Please see the web pages and consider supporting our team Stonington Stewards, or any other team. https://www.pledgereg.com/great-avalonia-trail-trek.  During the week I know I will be wandering the trails, doing routine stewardship, but also logging in miles for the Trek.  I will also be searching out more unique mushrooms to photograph.

Please keep your eyes open for some beautiful, colorful and very interesting inhabitants of the forest floor.  Avoid having children touch them and instruct them about proper caution. A good idea would be to use your camera or a sketch pad to enjoy them!  Have the kids draw them too.

Witch's Butter

Amanitas have bumps on their top
and are deadly.

What happens when a mushroom gets old?
It gets moldy!

Puffball-in-Aspic Yuck Jelly!

End of July Already!

 

Mid-summer musings.

Thanks to volunteers,
this trail is open, 
but not for long in this weather.

It is the end of July already. To me that still means that summer is half over ( even though I don’t worry about school vacations anymore)  and we all know that August goes by faster than July.  It always seems like it is a good point to stop and assess where we are, what we have, or have not done, and what we hope to accomplish in the remaining weeks of summer.

It has been hot and wet!  Steamier than I can ever remember July being and with more days of rain than in other Julys on record. I am sure there are those that have been really disappointed in the weather, but I will have to admit, I have been grateful for every drop because the plantings we have done at the Hoffman Preserve are thriving and we have not needed to constantly worry about watering them.  That would have been truly challenging. 

Tall stakes and color-coded tape
help us locate
small seedlings at Hoffman,

Everything else is growing up too, so it has been hard to relocate some of those little seedlings.  Thanks to a youth group work party from the Mystic Congregational Church, each plant was given a tall bamboo stake and a colored flag to indicate its species.  Now that they are getting their leaves, it is a lot easier to distinguish a sumac from a viburnum but those stakes are a huge help!   The wet loving plants, tupelo ( Nyssa sylvatica) and dogwood ( Cornus species)   are loving the moist soils.

One of the lovely
coral mushrooms.

The humidity and rainfall have been a boon for those of us who love to search for unique mushrooms.  Some are prized edibles, but I would never suggest anyone go sampling any mushroom in any landscape unless they were well educated!  Photography is safer, and being able to document some of the colors and forms of these unique organisms is really an interesting activity. There are apps for smart phones that can help identify species but even the best apps have a hard time with some of those little brown ones!  A friend and I used the same app, on the same mushroom, and there were a couple of times when the IDs did not match up immediately, but very close. In many cases, to get a definitive ID, you need a spore print.   I am happy with my photos and iNaturalist app.

There is a trail in here
somewhere.

On most preserves, everything else is growing like crazy too.  Vines, briars and invasives all seem to be competing for space and in doing so, reach out into the trails!  Many of the woodland trails are pretty hardened. Broad and open. They are shady pleasures during the hot summer.  But some of the more open areas, meadows and thickets require attention. Our stewards are out and about trying to keep up with things, but the conditions are daunting!  Feel free to hike with clippers and snip the encroaching vegetations. And we give our thanks in advance.  The invasive species seem to be more robust and numerous than ever. Many of our volunteers will be doing some field research and identification studies to better learn how to manage these species which outcompete our natives and are not as valuable to our wildlife.

Over the last months, Avalonia has been growing as well.  We have added acres of new land, now protected open space. Please keep checking the website for updates. Many thanks to those who donated to make the acquisition of the Sheets Preserve in North Stonington, a reality.   Other new preserves are being studied to note wildlife, habitats, sensitive areas and points of interest.  A management plan will be made for each one which will outline the goals and activities for each property.  Boundaries will be walked and posted. Trails will be created, with safety measures or improvements as needed.  The trails will be marked and then the areas will be opened to the public.  All of this takes a lot of work and maintaining all of our properties is becoming a huge challenge, considering all of us are volunteers and most of us are not professionals in any area dealing with habitat management! 

Say hi to Toby when you see
him on the trails!

So, it  is with real excitement that I can introduce our newest “acquisition,” a dedicated Stewardship Coordinator: Tobias Glaza.  Toby is a Mystic native and resident, with a background in ecology and management with lots of field experience. He brings this experience and great ideas to our growing organization. Best of all, he will help us organize our volunteers  to utilize our time and skills more efficiently, to accomplish what needs to be done to provide proper stewardship for all our beautiful places.  You can read more about him here. 

Maybe growing our stewardship team will allow us to keep up with the growing vegetation!! 

Hike safely and enjoy what summer has to offer.

Many mushrooms look alike and
it takes an expert to distinguish them.

Beautiful but deadly Amanita.

A true beauty

Nothing appetizing about Dog Vomit Slime Mold.

Musings at the Woodlot

By Beth Sullivan

Today was a beautiful day. FINALLY! Blue sky, low humidity, but maybe a bit warmer than one might expect for October 5. I wasn’t complaining, because I was joined by about 10 residents of the Stone Ridge community for a hike on the Woodlot Sanctuary. It is an easy hike, and you can easily do one or both loops to add some walking distance. Today we opted for the very flat and lovely yellow loop.

For years I hiked with school age kids who have great questions and powers of observations. This was fun today because not only do these slightly more senior folks have the some of the same questions and great observations, but we had an opportunity to think more deeply as we conversed along the trails. Experience makes for great insight.

A great gang from Stone Ridge offered insights and meaningful discussions on the trails. Photograph by Chuck Toal.

Watching the ground

Today we seemed to focus a lot on mushrooms and some other unique plants that are most abundant in the autumn. They were impossible to ignore as they were everywhere we looked. Many of us have become more interested in edible mushrooms and foraging recently. It was a great opportunity to share ideas, experiences, and our combined knowledge of these amazing organisms. With adults I didn’t have to worry they were going to pick and eat them on the spot or try them another time. With kids I wouldn’t even use the word edible and wild mushroom in the same sentence. We saw the great variety of colors that are visible now, as well as singles, clusters, corals, and all types from turkey tails to boletes and many of the gilled varieties.

We also were able to explore the subtle differences in some of the plants that are saprophytic. They are true plants, unlike fungi which are in a kingdom of their own. But because they lack chlorophyll, they must take food from another source, and those sources are very specific fungi that live in the soil and dependent on being near the roots of other plants like pine or oak trees. A very interesting relationship. We found Pinesap, Indian Pipes and Beech drops.

But something else we talked about was history of the land: recent years, generations to centuries of land use, and back to ice age as there are glacial erratics on the property. We also talked about change-somewhat appropriate for Columbus Day weekend-What changes did Europeans bring centuries ago, and what were the woods like then?

I would never tell a school-aged child that this is edible.

Indian Pipe

Pinesap

Beech drops

A little of the past

We know the history of the Woodlot Sanctuary back several generations. We would have to dig deeper to go back to colonial times and uses. We noted the large stumps of trees cut decades ago to provide wood for the owners’ homes. We also noted downed trees that came down due to natural causes including hurricanes and invasive insects like gypsy moths. Sadly, we noted many trees exhibiting signs of stress and disease. We know there were many American chestnut trees on the property long ago, but now there are only a few small ones. Black birch, a favorite of “kids” of all ages for the root-beer smell and flavor, are showing signs of a disease that causes cankers to erupt under the bark, weakening the trees over time. We also saw the many beech trees, some massive and old, but most doomed due to yet another disease that is killing them off before our eyes. Many of the great oaks have been damaged by gypsy moths and drought years . The few hemlocks have been affected by the Wooly Adelgid. Whether it is virus, fungus, bacteria or insects, even this small woodlot forest is under siege. It is hard to imagine what it might look like generations from now.

The question arose: Is it due to climate change? Great question, great discussion. It is hard not to feel that on a warmer than normal October day, when we haven’t yet had even a light frost, that the plants are not affected. But even if the plants themselves can adapt to warmer weather and longer growing seasons, it is the diseases, the insects, that are surviving longer, with the warmth creeping farther north, affecting our forests. We also live in a world where our boundaries are more porous, which can be a great thing in many instances, but it also means foreign organisms, diseases, or insects can find their way into our woodlands where there are no natural predators or controls. Back to Columbus again.

It was fun to think of all the changes this small woodlot has already witnessed but a bit sobering to wonder what is in store for the next generations, of people who love the woodlands, and the woodlands themselves.

Please get out this lovely autumn and appreciate all that we have now. Some of the very best places are right in your own back yards, and Avalonia has preserved so many of them for us all to appreciate.

Great old beech trees are succumbing to ad disease.

We spend a lot of time looking at the ground for fun fungi.  Photograph by Chuck Toal.

Photographs by Beth Sullivan, unless otherwise indicated.

The Humidity Has Been Good For Something

By Beth Sullivan

After the last month of rain and high humidity, we are all feeling a little damp and mildewed. And mold indeed is thriving, along with all of its fungal relatives. It is now prime mushroom season, a bit earlier this year than usual, thanks to the conditions. In a typical year, peak mushroom season, and all the festivals celebrating everything mycological, happen in September.

Amanita mushrooms are characterized by the rough bumps on top. They are deadly to eat and should not be touched. 

Turkey tails are unique, often beautiful and will persist into winter.

Fungi are in a Kingdom of their own

They are not plants at all, and surely they are not animals, but you would be surprised at some of their characteristics. They do not have true roots, or a vascular system, or flowers and seeds. They contain no chlorophyll so are unable to make their own food utilizing nutrients and sunlight. Have you noticed there are no real green mushrooms? They rely on obtaining their nutrients from the decay process that they are part of on the forest floor, utilizing all the dead plant material that is present there. They absorb their food through this process, rather than eating it or making it. Some are very specific, growing only near certain trees, by certain species of other plants, in very narrow ranges of pH (soil acidity). After several days, they themselves begin to get slimy and moldy and smell terrible. There is a very definite smell of decay and over-ripeness in the woods at this time of year. Here’s a fun fact: the outer tough skin of many mushrooms is made of Chitin, which is the same material as the shells of lobsters and crabs. Strange organisms.

Along with a wide variation in color, they also take many forms: the familiar umbrella, ruffles, shelves, turkey tails, and puffballs. If you have ever come upon a solid white ball on your lawn and think golf ball, experiment a little. A firm young puffball will be white all the way through and have a pleasing earthy smell. But wait a few weeks and find a puffball that has become browner with age. A touch with your toe or a flick of the finger will make it puff, explode with fine black dust, which is all the spores contained within. All mushrooms reproduce by releasing dusty spores.

This chicken mushroom is hard to miss and prized by many.

Early on a puffball is firm on the inside. Later it will dry and  fine black spores will be released when disturbed.

It's easy to see where a coral mushroom get its name.

More than meets the eye

Mushrooms are actually the visible, spore-producing bodies of a largely underground network of rhizome threads that comprise a fungus. The spread of the rhizomes extends great distances, but only one or two mushrooms may emerge. In other cases, many will pop up in the same area. Many are quite specific about where they grow and the conditions they need for survival, but one thing is generally universal: they need moisture to thrive. They can dry down to a dusty mass, but add water and some will reconstitute as good as new. There are fungi in every ecosystem - from the Antarctic, to deserts and jungles and cities, and even on our very own skin.

Take a hike in any shady cool woodland. Avalonia has many of these. Look on the ground, in the leaves, look on rotting tree trunks, branches and stumps. Notice the colors and textures and shapes. They may have the appearance of being nibbled. They are frequently eaten by small mammals, woodland turtles and insects and slugs. But don’t be tempted to pick and sample. Fungi are of great value for medicinal purposes, food processes (as in making cheese) and as prized edibles themselves. But be warned: there are also many mushrooms that are poisonous, or fatal, if eaten even in small quantities, so never mess with mushrooms unless you are with an expert. Bring a camera or sketch pad instead.

The underside of most mushrooms is covered with gills which hold and release spores.

The underside of bolete mushrooms have a spongy appearance and will often bruise blue when touched.

Photographs by Beth Sullivan.