While wandering around over the past few weeks, I have noticed our weather this summer has been really good for a few things. Mostly, it seems to be things like like humidity. Like slugs and mushrooms.
I don’t think I have ever realized how many different types of mushrooms there are. And they come in many different sizes and colours. Over the course of a relatively short walk, I managed to come across the usual various shades of brown and beige. But there were also shades of red, orange and even a sort of yellowish green.
While the thought of eating some of these is interesting, I have never figured out what are edible and which ones may want to kill you.
Like chanterelles. They are considered quite a delicacy. But there is also a false chanterelle which looks very similar, but is not at all good for you. It may not try to kill you, but it doesn’t taste very good. There are ways to tell one from the other. I have no idea what those ways are, so I just leave them alone.
And you can’t even trust the animals when it comes to these things. Squirrels eat mushrooms. But there are some that they can eat that will make us sick.
Like the ones with the red caps. I suspect these may be something squirrels can eat, simply because I came across one in a tree.
Now, it would not be impossible for a mushroom to grow in a tree. It could happen. But this one wasn’t growing. It was just stuck in the crotch of a branch, about five feet off the ground. It had not grown there. It had not walked there. So I suspect a small forest rodent was trying to hide a potential meal.
Since there were no squirrel bodies around the base of the tree, it did not appear as though this particular fungi was fatal to the squirrel. In fact, some of these types of mushrooms are edible. According to what I have seen, most of them won’t kill you, and many are actually edible. But some of them may make humans sick, while not bothering other animals in the least.
So it’s not even safe to follow the wildlife around to see what they are eating.
While I know there are edible mushrooms around us, I think I’ll just leave them alone. They are very attractive to look at though.
