Mushrooms in Fort Ridgely

A fascinating but little understood area of the natural world is the mushrooms that crop up once in a while in our lawns, on our trees and in the forests. Most people think of toadstools when they think of mushrooms not realizing this is just one of many types of mushrooms and even when they come up there are several stages that they go through before they give off their spores and decay. For example when you buy in the grocery store the white button mushroom, the brown cremini mushroom and the Portabello, they are different growth stages of the same species, Agaricus bisporus. Also mushrooms are like the fruit of the fungus and a small part of the whole organism. Most of the organism is below the ground or inside the tree or log in the form of "roots" or more precisely mycelium. Unlike plants they do not need light to photosynthesize their food. A popular book called Mushrooms of the Upper Midwest by Teresa Marrone and Kathy Yerich describes their role in the forest ecosystem this way. "More like animals, they use enzymes to break down what they consume. In their role as decomposers of organic matter, fungi are essential to life on earth because without them, the world would be buried in its own debris. In the forest,fungi break down dead or dying organic matter and render it into soil, making it usable for new growth." Most of this process happens below the surface in the mycellium and the visible mushrooms just happens during part of lifecycle. Like in a fruit tree, the apple or pear come out to produce seeds for the plant to produce more trees,.mushrooms come up to produce spores that can be spread to other areas where the fungus can then live.

A word of caution. Only eat mushrooms from the store or wild mushrooms that you absolutely know are edible! There are some poisonous mushrooms and many more that are not edible or tasty at all. Go with an experienced mushroom hunter who can show you how to tell which wild mushrooms are edible and how to tell them from similar ones that are not. I have met many people in Fort Ridgely in the spring hunting for the elusive morels in the park. Many have their favorite spots to look for them and they will never tell you where they are or you might get there before them and collect their crop. This tasty mushroom comes out at about the same time each year, when the lilacs start blooming. Below is a picture of a morel and another of a successful haul a nephew of mine and I made at Fort Ridgely in 2014. I have never had this much success since.

For more information: http://www.myminnesotawoods.umn.edu/2015/04/morel-mushrooms/

Another edible mushroom that I have found at Fort Ridgely is chicken of the woods. The picture below was of a colony of it growing on a tree in a neighbor's yard. They let me pick some and it tastes much like chicken when fried in butter.

For more information: http://www.minnesotaseasons.com/Fungi/Chicken_of_the_Woods.html

Chicken of the woods is an example of a shelf or bracket fungi. Some shelf fungi have separate shelves like the dryad's saddle below. This one was huge. This is how Fascinating Fungi of the North Woods by Cora Mollen and Larry Weber describe the brackets of chicken of the woods. "... multiple overlapping and clustered brackets with bright yellow-orange or salmon tops and intensely yellow undersides." If you zoom in on the picture above you can see the coloring and clustering of the brackets.

A very different but quite common mushroom is shaggy mane. Almost every year I see some growing in my yard under the maple trees. The ones pictured below were a large group my wife and I saw at Fort Ridgely at the far end of the valley below the chalet. They are a member of a family of mushrooms called inky caps (Coprinoid group). The toadstool gets very black and dissolves into an inky black fluid.

For more information: http://www.minnesotaseasons.com/Fungi/Shaggy_Mane.html

In a previous update I talked about ghost or Indian pipes. They are mycogenic in that they get their energy from fungi, not the sun. They are flowering plants but are parasitic off the mycellium of fungi below the surface. I show a picture below of the ghost pipes that are still blooming in the place indicated in the previous update.

For more information: https://www.fs.fed.us/wildflowers/beauty/mycotrophic/monotropa_uniflora.shtml

For a while about a week ago there were many of the honey mushrooms in the same area (see picture). They didn't last very long as it got increasingly dry in the area, I wondered if this was the mushroom that the ghost pipes relied on for sustenance. The Fascinating Fungi book verified that this is true.

For more information: http://minnesotaseasons.com/Fungi/Honey_Mushroom.html

I am fascinated by fungi even though I know so little about this living thing. I am constantly finding new and different fungi in the forest and even my lawn. One other fungus that I found at Fort Ridgely is the common earthball. It is a spherical ball like mushroom that is on the ground near trees. It does not have a stem like a toadstool but has roots that go into the ground from its base. It looks like a small puffball but is more solid. Later it develops a hole like a puffball and shoots out its spores from inside.

For more information: https://www.wildfooduk.com/mushroom-guide/common-earth-ball/

Last year I saw a coral tooth fungus near the bridge by the camping area. See the picture below to see how intricate the branching of this fungus is. Doesn't it look like a coral?! There is a whole group of coral mushrooms with quite a variety of shapes and sizes.

For more information: http://www.minnesotaseasons.com/Fungi/Coral_Tooth_Fungus.html

I close with a fungus I remember seeing on the forest floor in the ravines near our home growing up near Mankato. It is called scarlet elfcup. It is often growing on dead branches in early spring. It is nice to see the bright red color shortly after the snow melts and sometimes before any wildflowers are blooming. The one pictured below my wife picked up on a trail at Fort Ridgely this spring.

For more information: http://www.minnesotaseasons.com/Fungi/Scarlet_Cup.html

Bethany Hawkwatch

Professor Chad Heins send a blurb about the annual raptor count going on in the Mankato Area: “Bald Eagle and Red-tailed Hawk migration is ahead of schedule. What that means for the winter has yet to be determined.” For more information: http://hawkcount.org/month_summary.php?rsite=704

Documentary: “Gather – The Fight to Revitalize Our Native Foodways”

Itasca State Park Naturalist Connie Cox shared this link about a documentary focusing on the importance of food for Indigenous people, their health and culture:

https://www.nativefoodsystems.org/watch/