Some Mushroom Guides Are Good — and Some Might Kill You

Two reliable guidebooks — and some elderly Shaggy Parasols

A post on X-formerly-Twitter two days ago linked to another post on Reddit that claimed,

My entire family was in hospital last week after accidentally consuming poisonous mushrooms.

My wife purchased a book from a major online retailer for my birthday. The book is entitled something similar to "Mushrooms UK: A Guide to Harvesting Safe and Edible Mushrooms."

I don't know if this incident is true or not, but ones like it have been predicted. A year ago there was a rush of articles about mushroom field guides. created by artificial intelligence networks (chatbots) that are for sale on Amazon ("makor online retailer"?) and other places.

Other AI-written books are flooding in too, some bearing the names of real authors. Amazon claims to be dealing with this issue, but don't hold your breath.

Meanwhile, if you want good Southern Rockies mushroom guides, there are some written by real people who know their fungi.

PPMS president James Chelin
talking mushrooms in the field.

For years, Vera Stucky Evenson's Mushrooms of Colorado and the Southern Rocky Mountains was my guide. That 1997 edition is now out of print, and used copies on Amazon go for more than $100.

A revised version, Mushrooms of the Rocky Mountain Region, is more reasonably priced.

Local is always best, and now I supplement "Saint Vera" with Foraging Mushrooms of the Rocky Mountains, written by several people within the Colorado Mycological Society and the Pikes Peak Mycological Society.

 It is is not as broad, because it focuses on (a) edible wild mushrooms and (b) look-alikes that might not be so edible. Plus it includes some recipes, including one for hawk's wing pickles that I have already tried. 

It's the go-to field guide right now, as far as I am concerned, if edible mushrooms are the goal. Maybe I will have to go for Evenson's second book eventually. After all, she has an underground laboratory at the Denver Botanic Gardens — how perfect is that?

 

Bear with Me — There's More

Bear enjoying late-season tomatoes.

More links that I need to clear . . . 

• "The Hermit: New Mexico's First Mountaineer" — it's a story of religion, violence, penitence, and isolation, in other words, New Mexico.

• Some birds do well in cities and suburbs. How can we help them?

• We are told the decades of forest-fire suppression has led to hotter, bigger files. But a CU study suggests that severe fires are not new on Colorado's Front Range.  

• Plans to sequence the genome of the oldest dogs found in North America.

• Outdoor magazine's best 25 books for well-read explorers. Old Glory, yes!

• Everyone hears about Coronado's expedition in the American southwest,  no one about Francisco Leyva de Bonilla's. Maybe that is because it was such as disaster.

• Saving a big piece of southeastern Colorado's canyon country. And a chunk of the High Plains east of Pueblo.

• Why are we still talking about Chris "Supertramp" McCandless?

Twenty-three years after his death, McCandless still has people talking — debating his cause of death, condemning his choices and discussing how perhaps they, too, can leave everything behind and walk into the wild.

• A "river of sheep" in northwestern Colorado. Good photos.

A Mysterious Antique Box: Book Trailer from Florence, Colorado

No one is making movies in Florence, Colo., that I know of, but a book trailer was shot there for the novel Come Six to Seven by Mac Evenstar.

I am still wrapping my head around the idea of books having "trailers," but this one gives you a good luck at the self-proclaimed "antiques capital of Colorado" — and why not, Denver's South Broadway district ain't what it used to be.

This goes on the "to read" list, thanks to the Florence blog True Story Club.

October Weather Report

"That October, the weather couldn't decide what to do with itself. Some days it arrived gray and bleak and pensive. Ponderous leaden clouds leaned overhead, their bellies slumped against the peaks of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains; polar blasts of wind and stiff black leaves blindly scrambling down the streets. . . . . Other days, the weather arrived sleek and sassy. The air  was warm and it had a glitter to it, and a fizz. Only one of two clouds trailed across the taut blue sky, each fluttering brilliant white from the shoulders of the mountains like an aviator's scarf. Sun-besotted, people stood around wearing summer slacks and summer skirts and grins that were grateful and a little bit guilty, the grins of children who had pulled a fast one on their parents. They licked ice cream cones and they sipped sodas and they were very vocal about the wonderfulness of the climate, and in their voices you could sometimes hear a hint of self-congratulation at the wisdom they had shown in choosing to live [in Santa Fe]."

The opening of Flower in the Desert, a mystery by Walter Satterthwait

Blog Stew with Lynx

• A list of nature books for young readers from the John Burroughs Association.

• Famous Canadian environmentalist David Suzuki suffers a public meltdown over British Columbia politics.

• The Colorado Division of Wildlife reports births of some second-generation lynx kittens:

"The discovery of kittens this year is extremely promising," said Tanya Shenk, DOW lynx field researcher. "The locations of the dens show that lynx are beginning to expand their ranges and are once again finding both food and habitat necessary for successful reproduction."

In addition, two dens housed kittens from Colorado-born parents--the first kittens documented where both parents are native to Colorado. Division biologists believe there may be additional dens and kittens not found during this year's survey.

• Turtles eating things. What it says.

Green Hell

Rain, rain, unceasing rain! The green walls of the forest seem to creep closer and closer. We are low on firewood, and nothing is dry.

Members of the garrison grow mopey and quarrelsome. Only Lieutenant Fisher remains obstinately cheerful, if somewhat thick-headed.

It is, however, perfect weather for reading David Grann's The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon, about the search for Colonel Fawcett's lost expedition of the 1920s.

You Say Binocular...

I say binoculars, but Tom McIntyre's The Field & Stream Hunting Optics Handbook actually covers shooting glasses, rifle and telescopes, binoculars, and rangefinders. And flashlights.

Before turning to binoculars, however, McIntyre devotes chapters to the eye itself and to shooting and prescription eyeglasses for the hunter ("You need protective [lenses]—think hunting with Dick Cheney.")

The Hunting Optics Handbook is moderately technical. You need to know some formulas to compare the "twilight factor" of two different spotting scopes you are comparing, for example — how well they work under low-light conditions.

But along with the useful, contemporary information, McIntyre packs in a lot of history (of lenses, iron rifle sights, and marksmanship), and that history makes this book something more than a technical treatise.

He suggests, for instance, that General Custer's bad day on the Little Bighorn in June 1876 might have been partially due to his "low-powered, undoubtedly high-dispersion-lens field glasses."

After trying to study the terrain through the mid-morning heat shimmer, Custer allegedly turned to scout Mitch Bouyer and said, "My eyes are as good as yours, and I don't see any Indians."

Supposedly the same glasses turned up on one of the Lakota corpses at Wounded Knee a generation later.

Since serious purchases of spotting scopes, etc., can run well into three figures--or more--doesn't it make sense to spend $15 and a few hours educating yourself first? And then keep The Field & Stream Hunting Optics Handbook on the bookshelf the pleasure of reading about a medieval pope's eyeglasses or Hiram Berdan's sharpshooters.