for the first time yesterday a friend and i whent for a walk through the woods looking for mushies, and to my suprise they were every were i couldnt walk with out steping on them, but they all looked the same i found my self lost in identifing or even having a clue. whats the easiest way to go about this? go with sum one that knows whats up. i dont know ne1 like that. i know they exist in the area i was looking a kid in school once told me about picking them in the fall after it rains. i have tried reading up in the hunting guides found on this site but they dont seem to help. if it helps i live in upper michigan on the shore of lake superior. the leaves are starting to change and fall the temps out side are any were from 50 to low 70s for a couple more weeks any way. what kind of mushies should i expect to find? please help
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Check cow and sheep pastures for Psilocybe semilanceata(Liberty caps) they won't be found growing directly in dung, but rather in large clumps of sedge grass in the pasture. Look hard in these grass clumps, these mushrooms are small and easily missed.
Look under the grow find section of this site and use the hunting guide, it has some good examples of Ps. semilanceata.
LK,
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basic shroom hunting without a guide
1 don't plan on eating ANYTHING that you find without first getting someone who knows whats up to identify your find.
2 get a bunch of those small paper lunch-bags. they need to be clean, preferably unused, and you'll need as many as twenty of them per person per hunt.
3 go out and collect as many shrooms as possible. use a tool to be sure you dig up the entire stem as this is sometimes critical to identification. separate taxonomicly similar, (they all look very similar, they come from the same patch, etc.)shrooms into separate bags.
do not presume that since they look similar that they are the same. write on the paper bag, info about where you found the shrooms,( ie. NE corner of the park under an oak tree.)
4 using typing paper and cups or similar materials, take a spore print of each and every adult shroom you collect. keep the juveniles in the bag nearby each sheet of paper, which has your spore prints on it. you will have collected as broad a range of specimens as possible, juveniles, adults, old ones, light colored ones darker colored ones, all that you suspect may be the same species. a note here, a single individual specimen is very difficult to get a positive ident on, even for old hands.
get several field guides on mushrooms and go through the taxonomic keys until you have narrowed the possibilities down to three or four prospects. take a good picture of your shrooms you have collected put something like a dollar bill in the photo for comparison. dry your prospective sample. go back to the original bed a few days later, and see if you can get a photo of the shrooms in their habitat, get a detailed description of the things the shrooms were growing in on around. post on this site, and see if you were right. don't be dissapointed if you were wrong, as you will often be.
i made 136 separate collections before i collected my first active mushroom. ( i numbered each page of spore prints). many people collect many more than that before finding their first good ones.
this is a lot less efficient than getting someone who can act as a guide, but there is no better way to gain a solid foundation to build upon. good luck.
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