Foragers take new knowledge into forest to find fungi

With names like delicious milky, hawks wing, chaga, puffballs and fairy farts, mushrooms found throughout Southeast are diverse in shape, color and edibility. Some can be used as fabric dyes, and some can kill a person if eaten.

Over the course of last Friday and Saturday, field mycologist and author Noah Siegel educated resident foragers on which mushrooms are safe and which should be avoided.

For about 90 minutes last Friday evening, Siegel, of Royalston, Massachusetts, spoke to a group of nearly 50 people at the Irene Ingle Public Library, detailing the various species of mushrooms found in Southeast down into the Pacific Northwest. On any given walk along Wrangell's trails, Siegel estimated anywhere from 50 to 75 species could be found.

The following morning, Siegel took a group of about 40 people on a trek up Rainbow Falls to gather and identify as many species as they could find. Before the walk, he gave attendees a bit of edible fungal advice.

"A good rule of thumb: Don't eat little brown mushrooms," Siegel said. There are some that are safe, but most aren't. "If you learn 10 (species) you'll become the mushroom expert in town ... you'll be the fungi or fun gal."

Siegel has been researching mushrooms for 33 years and has co-authored "Mushrooms of the Redwood Coast: A Comprehensive Guide to the Fungi of Coastal Northern California" with Christian Schwarz. He's currently working on "Mushrooms of Cascadia," a book which he said features 50% more new mushrooms not featured in his previous guide.

"In (Southeast Alaska), there's probably close to 1,000 (species of mushrooms)," he said. "You're not going to see them every single year, and it could be years in between seeing them."

Mushrooms can be just as picky as people on where they live. In an area with spruce or hemlock, there may only be about 600 species of mushroom, Siegel said, whereas entirely different species would be found in the muskeg or alpine.

"Yesterday, the smallest thing I saw was this thing called endogone pisiformis, which is about (the size of a pinhead) and is bright yellow and grows on moss," he said about a walk up Mount Dewey where he found about 50 mushrooms. "The largest thing was a catathelasma, which was about 14 inches across."

Out of the mushrooms that Siegel found, he said five or six are worth eating, possibly 10 more were edible but not something people would want to eat, and nothing was "deadly poisonous, but would make you sick if you ate them."

In Wrangell, there are two or three deadly poisonous species, 10 edible species, 50 to 75 poisonous species and about the same number of species you could eat but wouldn't eat again. The rest of the species fall somewhere in between all those, Siegel said. "It's fairly easy to learn a handful of good edibles."

Many in attendance at the lecture and the field trip wanted to know what mushrooms were safe to eat, but they were just as curious about the natural world in Wrangell's backyard.

"I know Washington state mushrooms, but I don't know what's specific to the region up here," said Dave Davidson, who has been foraging since he was a child, being taught by his father. "You can move from one region to another and some things will look the same, some will look different. You might end up getting poisoned, so I'm here to learn."

Fungus found on the underside of hollowed-out trees, growing trailside or even stair-stepping up tree trunks (a kind known as bear bread) were in abundance along the trail on Saturday. However, Siegel said after a dry spell, such as the one Wrangell recently had, mushrooms would be more scarce than usual. Dry weather, followed by wet, then dry and more wet would spur mushrooms to emerge more abundantly from their vast underground networks.

Melody Morford and Heather Kaminski joined the outing to Rainbow Falls and within a few minutes of setting out on the trail they had found about five different species.

"It's always been on our mind to learn more and then the opportunity presented itself and we took it," Kaminski said. "We're excited to be out, just discovery what there is to see. It's like a new lens that's been opened up."