I saw a group of these today on Cape Cod, and using this book,
...I was able to identify them as an
edible, even delicious fungus called the black chanterelle or horn of
death, also known as craterellus fallax. To me, they look more like part of a Halloween costume than an edible fungus.
Nevertheless, a web site written by Tom Volk of the botany department at the University of Wisconsin https://botit.botany.wisc.edu/toms_fungi/july98.html
opines that this fungus, craterellux fallax, is
"...actually a
delicious edible mushroom. It's not prized for its flavor or texture,
but mainly for its odor, which is very sweet (much like apricots,) and woodsy at the same time. [...] People who eat this mushroom
generally like it in spaghetti sauce. I prefer it sautéed in olive oil
and butter and eaten directly or in stir-fry. It dries very well and
adds a great flavor to eggs cooked in the middle of winter...."
Yeah, that sounds great, but I'm not gonna try it.
Here on Cape Cod, with all this rain, it's mushroom season. I found out today that gathering mushrooms is allowed within the Cape Cod National Seashore, and that in fact it's a very popular activity. This information came from a guy named Jason, who identified himself as the supervisor of Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife's Southeast Management Area, speaking from an office in Buzzard's Bay. https://www.mass.gov/locations/masswildlife-southeast-district-office
Here's a published example stating the popularity of this pastime: http://www.capecodtimes.com/article/20081018/news/810180307
Tomorrow--now that it's stopped raining--we're going to go out and look. I don't want to eat these things necessarily, I just want to see them and know what they are.
Like this delightful little number, which I saw today:
It looks like a product of equine digestion, doesn't it? Nevertheless, I was able to identify it as pisolithus tinctorius, also known as the dyemaker's puffball, dead man's fist, horse dung fungus, or dog turd fungus.
You can't eat this one...aw, shucks! But according to the Scientific American's blog, you can look inside one of these things and see a work of art:
According to Scientific American,
"The roundish objects are locuoles, packets of ripening spores that you
can see in successive stages of readiness from the bottom (center) of
the fungus to the top, where they metamorphose into powdery puffs of
cinnamon spores. Pisolithus literally means "pea stone", and I
think you can see how it got that name. They are embedded within a black
matrix, through which they appear to bubble up like air in an aquarium
in a beautiful textural mosaic of color. The black matrix is the stuff
that dyers use to color cloth a shade of reddish brown or black, according to Volk, [referring to Tom Volk of the University of Wisconsin, mentioned above] giving the fungus its common name."
I never would have been tempted to pull up one of them and bisect it lengthwise, as Jennifer Frazer, the author of the Scientific American piece, apparently did. But now that I've seen how crazy interesting it is on the inside, I might just go do that.
How did I get so interested in fungi?
Last year at this time, as the trailing coattails of Hurricane Jose swept over the Cape, Joe and I went out to the Atlantic White Cedar Swamp Trail, https://www.nps.gov/caco/planyourvisit/atlanticwhitecedar.htm for a walk after all the rain. We had no idea that we would see the number and variety of fungi that we saw. I wrote about it here:
One guy was running through the woods collecting them in a shopping bag. I asked him how he knew what he was doing and he said he was going to look them up when he got home. Good luck, I told him.
That experience led me and Joe to a mushroom collecting experience at Hartford's Cedar Hill Cemetery a few weeks ago.
Joe Lenoce, a member of the Connecticut Mycological Society http://cvmsfungi.org/index.html handed out paper lunch bags, inviting us to go forth and gather mushrooms and bring them back to him for identification. He had a big tome with him, from which he was able to identify everything we brought him.
Did you know that mushrooms are officially fungi, and that the part we see above ground is only the fruiting body? The fruiting body does its thing and goes back into the earth, but the below ground part of the fungus, called the mycelium, is perennial. According to the BBC, http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20141114-the-biggest-organism-in-the-world, there is a mycelium in Oregon that is so big that it covers two square miles and is the largest living thing on earth.
A humongous fungus.
Soon we're going to follow this magical-looking path through Atlantic White Cedar Swamp and see what we can find:
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