Tag: poisonous fungi

You won’t find me saying my prayers very often!

And notwithstanding appearances I’m not saying them here either. What I am doing is attempting to photograph a very small fungus while holding a six inch ruler behind it. In plants and fungus spotting size really does matter. Here’s what I was trying to get a picture of – it’s a tiny clump of candlesnuff fungus on some dead wood up on the Mendip hills.

Two things coincided which I wanted to write something about; the first was a random comment by a young man a couple of weeks ago which rang some serious warning bells in my mind. The second reason was our first fungus hunting visit to Priddy this late autumn. As to the first challenge I should say at the start that although I’ve never consumed any kind of hallucinogenic substance I am very interested in such properties and I’m filled with wonder at the way plants and fungi can synthesize unimaginably complex molecules which have the effect of reversibly changing our brains. Anyway I was having a conversation about Psilocybin with this young man and he mentioned that Velvet Bottom was a good place to gather them. Now I know Velvet Bottom well; it’s one of my favourite places on Mendip – however I wouldn’t eat anything foraged from there because the whole site is heavily polluted with lead, zinc and even cadmium to the extent that in some patches of ground nothing will grow except a few heavy metal tolerant plant specialists. Grazing by sheep is only allowed for very short periods to maintain the habitat, and downstream in Shipham gardening has, at times, become severely restricted due to fears of cadmium poisoning. I’m sure that readers of the Potwell Inn would never dream of boiling up magic mushrooms or, for that matter Fly agarics to make tea but just in case any readers were planning post retirement breakouts, I’d advise that there are safer places than Velvet Bottom to begin a life of crime.

But I also wanted to write about the metaphorically fatal attractions of fungi which can get very obsessive. I’m just grateful it’s a relatively short season. Fungi are beautiful, strange, mysterious and fleeting visitors which spend most of their time invisible and underground. What we see are the fruiting bodies; the spore carrying parts which can carry their offspring many miles. To be fair, fungi can be very hard to identify and although there are now one or two phone apps that will have a go, they’re still nowhere near safe enough to pronounce any fungus edible. I was testing one new app while we were out and although it easily managed some simple tasks, it failed completely on quite a number. I got many warnings that such-and-so was potentially dangerous. I don’t forage theses days in any case but I have poisoned our cat – which luckily recovered, and come within a whisker of poisoning Madame and me. Even easily recognised and safe fungi – St George’s mushroom for instance has built up intolerance over any years with some real experts, and suddenly made them ill.

But there’s more than enough aesthetic and scientific interest in fungi to compensate for leaving them in the ground. I’ll just put a few pictures up below to show the huge variety of form, texture and colour that they can display – not to mention odour which can range across the whole spectrum from apricot to dead sheep. I love them, and look forward to meeting them again every autumn and then there are always lichens, mosses and liverworts to fill the dark days of winter with fascination. My suggestion would be to photograph anything you encounter that interests you and make a note of the location – you can usually do this on your phone. Then perhaps one day you’ll feel inclined to identify and organise them in a spreadsheet and make a contribution to proper science in this time of global species extinction and climate change. All these below were photographed in a short walk last Thursday.

On Saturday I mended the allotment shed window which had been smashed months ago by vandals. I thing by comparison with the fungi my handiwork lacks a certain architectural je ne sais quois !

About foraging

Although I didn’t agree with the general conclusions of Charlie Gilmour’s piece on foraging in this weekend’s Observer newspaper I’d agree that the craft of foraging can be a great builder of relationship with the natural world. I’ll never forget the sense of gratitude that followed a blackberrying expedition with Madame in which we harvested many pounds of free fruit and subsequently ruined all of them in a truly disgusting chutney. Foraging will always entail a few culinary skills as well as the observational and identification skills that should keep you out of Intensive Care. That said, we have safely foraged and eaten many pounds of field mushrooms and enjoyed them greatly; but even a field mushroom has close relatives and lookalikes that demand identification skills. Most of the folk tales – can you peel it? does it blacken silver? are absolute nonsense and so we come back to experience and prior knowledge. If I can share the single most important question to ask of any fungus (or indeed plant) is – “where’s it growing?” The immediate environment; open field or field edge? maybe woodland but if that, what kind of trees? What kind of soil or underlying rock is it – acid or limestone? Is it growing on dead wood or in the ground? There’s always the possibility, as on the Mendip Hills, that an otherwise harmless edible plant or fungus has absorbed poisonous heavy metals, and many fungi have confusing lookalikes. Fairy Ring Champignons which are edible and dry well; can sometimes even share a ring with Fool’s Funnels – Clitocybe rivulosa which is poisonous.

It’s the kind of breezy confidence that all will be well which short circuits the hard labour of learning plants and fungi; I should know because the only reason I’m here writing this is that on several occasions I’ve prepared poisonous fungi and even started cooking them, when a last minute change of heart saved my/our skin. I even poisoned the cat on one occasion but mercifully after a good heave and a rash, she lived to tell the tale. Even worse, two highly experienced mycologists I know have developed an intolerance for the St George’s Mushroom after decades of eating it safely. There could be long queues of very sick people waiting for liver transplants if foraging became suddenly fashionable. The idea of sending naive collectors out into the fields and forests after a one-day course really scares me.

As does the idea of French style hunting days – otherwise known as circular firing squads – with inexperienced people thrashing around in the woods with no idea how to fire a gun safely. Once again I speak from experience having almost been shot by an overexcited man who – having paid his £500 for a day’s pheasant shooting, forgot the rule about shooting above the trees and gave me and our son the fright of our lives, with lead shot hitting the trees all around us. He was, I’m pleased to say, sent home immediately! Frankly, if you want to eat a pheasant – and spatchcocked mice and roast fox don’t float my boat (see article) – then buy one from a game dealer and save yourself retching over the entrails when you finally find out that most living creatures are full of glistening plumbing, oh and well hung squirrel and other roadkill can give you all sorts of weird diseases that will keep the doctors from their beds. I have no absolute problem with killing and preparing living creatures but the taking of any life should never be done for fun or sport but to meet a genuine need and it requires some skill, so it’s important to seek a good teacher.

When we were at art school we had to work all the vacations to make ends meet, and one summer I worked next door to a slaughterhouse where hundreds of pigs were killed every day. That was my first and best ever lesson in industrial meat production and it left an indelibly negative impression on me. But I learned about gutting and skinning rabbits sitting on the shed step with the head groundsman where I worked another two summers and who made it all look easy. When we kept chickens I got the local butcher to show me how to kill them without cruelty and he showed me why it was never really worth plucking pheasants or pigeons. If, as Charlie Gilmour says, you feel the need for foraged meat protein then you have to take responsibility, be a moral grownup and learn to do the job well. Does all this sound off-putting? Well – it’s the reality – and there’s no escape by trying to pass the responsibility onto someone else.

So that’s fungi and foraged meat dealt with, but what about plants, grains and suchlike? My big fear is that hordes of indiscriminate foragers could do untold damage to precious environments. Already, in Cornwall, professional foragers from outside of the area (obviously they come from Devon or worse still, down from London) have stripped whole roadsides of wild garlic and in Epping Forest mushroom hunters have been caught with upwards of 30 Kg of fungi. People I know well think nothing of harvesting thousands of Psilocybe mushrooms on the Bannau Brycheiniog but maybe that’s a different issue! However – and here I’m with Charlie Gilmour – if the end result is a new generation of naturalists who understand and love the natural world, coming to it via an interest in foraging, then what’s not to like? We should stop being so sniffy about people who ask about edibility on fungus websites and at least point them in the direction of the best help. I appreciate the caution about liability and insurance and all that, but duty of care can be expressed more helpfully than blanket prohibition accompanied by harsh words.

The world of plants is absolutely fascinating but foraging is never going to be capable of feeding the world short of some catastrophic collapse in the population, so let’s just see it as a getting to know you operation where our knowledge spreads out from the focus of interest like the spokes of a wheel and we land up grasping the wonderful interconnectedness of all living things on earth. Perhaps then, and finally, we’d know our place in it.

You can stuff your truffles!

It doesn’t take long for us to find our inner forager, especially when we know a place as well as we know this. The fungi in the picture are Macrolepiota procera – parasol mushrooms. We were pleased to see them, although we didn’t collect them (I don’t recall ever having eaten them) – however they were a good sign that the season is underway and so we were a bit more switched on to see what other fungi we could find, and they were there: horse mushrooms, puffballs, waxcaps and fairy ring mushrooms – dried they’re very good in stocks but a bit too tough to be palatable.

So we went on to a tried and tested clifftop site and found the field mushrooms exactly where they’ve appeared in the past. They were a bit more difficult to collect, though, and I had to scramble across a steep cleft and down the top of a cliff to get a handful of button mushrooms – they’re the best because they’re less likely to have been attacked by grubs – the one in the photo was the best we saw but it involved a dangerous climb over a thirty foot drop so we left it. In twenty minutes we’d collected enough for breakfast plus one intruder that was probably a yellow staining mushroom, and which betrayed itself in the bag by turning chrome yellow. I’ve been caught out by them before and always because greed overcame caution or I picked them on the borders of a hedge in longer grass. Luckily I’ve never eaten them, but our cat once ate some that I put aside (she licked them because they were cooked in butter) and she was violently ill, poor thing. This particular usurper was hanging around the edge of a patch of gorse. The genuine field mushrooms prefer open grass, particularly when it’s well cropped by sheep. In our last house we lived next to the playing field of the local primary school, and every summer there was a competition between me and the local milkman to harvest the masses of mushrooms early in the morning. He was a very early riser and it turned into a bit of a competition until we agreed a truce and each left plenty for the other.

But field mushrooms are a proper treat. Overnight the kitchen filled with their fragrance and cleaned and fried this morning they turned an omelette into a feast. I do wonder a bit why people pay such fabulous prices for imported truffles. Our son’s a chef and he once gave us a whole black truffle as a Christmas present and, to be brutally honest, it tasted like the smell of a gas leak – not North Sea gas, but the old fashioned sort of towns gas. If it was as free as a field mushroom and if it grew locally we’d probably acquire a taste for them but paying fifty quid and much more for them seems more like a way of poncifying – or worse, disguising – mediocre food and just bragging about the rarity and expense. Anyway, the seasons roll on endlessly and each brings its delights; autumn fruits and fungi give way to the winter when the only show in town for a nosy naturalist are bryophytes and lichens – always something to try and identify.

We’re slowly learning how best to use the trailcam, and we’ve captured some decent videos of birds. Last night a fox was poking around in the woods below the cottage, so tonight I’ll put out some peanuts to try to lure it closer.

Yesterday on our clifftop walk I noticed something red hiding in the grass on the edge and it turned out to be a Crocosmia – goodness knows how it got there, it’s miles from the nearest garden. But what else is in flower at the moment? Given that it was a proper walk I had to be circumspect but I spotted (without being spotted) loads of yarrow, watermint, common ragwort, fleabane, a few stragglers of silverweed and ditto thrift, purple clover,lesser knapweed, red campion, bramble, meadowsweet, wild angelica and, of course heather.

Then there was one harvestman spider – I don’t know why I was so pleased to see it but I was!

And then the birds – sorry this is turning into a list, a bit of symptom possibly, but we were alerted by the insistent demands of a young shag demanding food, herring gulls in abundance, one oystercatcher hanging out in a little inlet that we climbed down to. Last year we spotted seals there and last night you could see why. A shoal of fish were leaping in the water, some of them large enough to see their dorsal fins quite clearly. The oystercatcher is a lot bigger than you’d expect when you get close. Finally, and I’m not that good at birds, there were a small number of what I think were terns, in the mix. I’ve come back and read them up a bit so when we go back I can identify them properly.

The coast path was crowded with walkers – and I mean crowded – Madame asked one group (rather challengingly I thought) where their coach was parked. Whistling sands was more crowded than we’ve ever seen it so we beat a retreat and completed our walk in the evening, rather luckily as it turned out because we picked our breakfast.

Oh and as we walked the path we found what looked like an ancient earthwork but which, I suspect was a more recent (last century) attempt to drain a large area of marsh. Luckily it hadn’t succeeded so that’s a treat for another expedition and a different set of books!