Words and photos by Matt Dursum
WARNING! DO NOT TREAT THIS AS A MUSHROOM HUNTING GUIDE. PLEASE DO NOT EAT WILD MUSHROOMS UNLESS YOU ARE 100% SURE YOU IDENTIFIED THEM PROPERLY
This October, my friends inundated my social media inbox with photos from their fall hiking trips in Michigan. They included every mushroom they found, knowing that I would be obsessively trying to identify them. The same weekend, I saw my favorite vlogger Alexis Nikole Nelson, aka Black Forager’s fun video on finding Lions Mane that she prepared into a delicious mushroom crab cake. It’s the beginning of spring here in South America, and I couldn’t help but get whisked away to memories of my first foray into mushroom hunting in northern Michigan.
Last year, in 2021, I ventured into the unknown territory of mushroom hunting with very little previous knowledge. The potentially life-threatening activity was to me something reserved for expert mycologists or people who spent their lives learning how to find them. Other than being taught how to find morels, I was completely ignorant.
Michigan has a long and enduring mushroom hunting legacy that started with its earliest indigenous inhabitants. Today, the community of mushroom hunters in the state is growing and I was eager to join them.
A Hobby’s Humble Beginnings
This started with an assignment for Traverse Magazine on spring foraging. I consider myself quite knowledgeable about edible plants and I knew how to safely identify morels. During a photoshoot for the magazine, the photographer, her friend, and I found a bounty of ramps and other tasty spring greens and eventually a tasty looking Morel. It was standing like a sacred monument in the middle of the path. For our photoshoot, it was perfect.
As summer passed, I couldn’t help but get excited every time I found something new. Using my handy Picture Mushroom fungi identification app, I would get a first identification. Then I would carefully snag a cap and bring it back home. Next I would take a spore print. I laid the caps face down halfway over a black and a white cloth. Over the course of a few hours I would have a spore print. The colors and patterns of the spores help to accurately identify the mushroom.
Spore prints are just one of many keys to identifying mushrooms. Accurately deciding what to put into your body without killing yourself requires a series of “if it has this feature, then look for this too,” questions that must be answered. Even then, a forager should only ingest a tiny amount at first. Fungi are complex organisms containing complex molecules that may affect everyone’s digestive system differently.
The above mushrooms should be left alone!
Most of what I found was poisonous, and a few were deadly. As the season went on, I continued identifying and documenting what I found. I was learning how to keep my attention focused on the forest floor and different sections of trees. Video tutorials like those from the YouTube channel Know Your Land and mushroom foraging books kept my attention through summer. As fall approached, I was ready.
An Autumn Bounty
Once October hit, I began seeing mushrooms in abundance. Not just the typical eat-too-many-and-your-dead varieties, no. I was finding and identifying a bouquet of edible and delicious morsels.
Oyster mushrooms were my first bounty. While hiking through my favorite trail, I caught a glimpse of white objects covering a fallen tree out of the corner of my eye. I hurriedly lept over fallen logs and underbrush until I peered through the bushes and saw an endless cluster of beautiful Oyster Mushrooms. I gathered them, once again took a spore print, and ate savory meaty fungi for days.
Next up came the Honey Mushrooms. These delicious fruiting bodies come from one of the largest living things on the planet. Honey mushrooms seem to infect the entire forest in fall. They cover the bases of trees, rotting logs, and buried wood under the forest floor. They have a super toxic look-alike called the Deadly Gallerina which has a rusty brown spore print—Honey Mushrooms have a white one.
Once I accurately identified them, I began taking them home. Honey Mushrooms have to be cooked thoroughly to remove their mild toxins. Because some people have mild stomach reactions to them, I started with little bites at a time and waited a day for any adverse reaction. Fortunately, I never got any, and I soon began making the tastiest soup stocks of my life by stewing the Honey Mushrooms overnight with ginger, garlic, and Chinese spices.
The Jackpot
As delicious as honey and oyster mushrooms were, I kept looking for arguably the tastiest and most nutritious fungi in the forest. Giant puffballs were a pleasant find. Sliced and fried, they tasted like a pleasant hard tofu—meaning little flavor of their own.
My primary mission was to find Chicken of the Woods and Hen of the Woods, two easy to identify, highly nutritious and superbly delicious fall mushrooms. I regrettably never found them, even after painstakingly combing the forest for hours every week.
What I found instead blew my mind. When I was walking on my favorite Northern Michigan trail, I passed a hardwood with a few peculiar growths. Upon inspecting them, I knew I had found a large Lions Mane. This odd-looking mushroom is one of the healthiest and contains several possible memory-boosting and Alzheimer’s-fighting compounds.
When I took my piece home, I sliced it up and pan fried it with butter and garlic. The mushroom’s taste was like lobster, only to me slightly richer. This was the highlight of my first year of mushroom hunting.
Today, I’m sitting at my computer as the spring thunderstorms roar outside. I’m in Misiones Province in Argentina, just a stone’s throw from the jungles of Brazil and Paraguay. In a few days, I’ll be hitting the forested trails surrounding the Iguazu Falls, and looking closely at all the possibly edible, possibly deadly fungus around me. For the sake of my health and the comfort of my loved ones, I’ll keep my hobby reserved for the forests of my home state and patiently wait until I can be there again in fall.