I had to get around to these guys eventually, and some boletes growing out in the yard were the push I needed. All of these phots to sort through! I hopped online and found the Puget Sound Mycological Society, and (of course) blasted them with 20 images at once. The autoreply came back letting the mushroomID user that they are swamped right now, and as such, they need two things: 1) Try to figure it out before you send a request, and 2) Send one at a time.
It's been interesting to cull through the images, and I thankfully got a lot of them with stems, gills, and caps taken from different angles. So I'm going to spend some time making an honest ID effort here, and will type it up once I figure it out or get stuck.
1. Fly Agaric
I went out the day after a good rain up to Echo Mountain and came across these guys. Same species of mushroom, apparently! The bottom one seems to be Yellow Fly Agaric - there are many subspecies. I am waiting to hear about the top one. These are the classic toadstool mushrooms, and are quite universally as toxic as one would expect.
Amanita muscaria is what I was going with, just based on pictures, but I did get a response on these from the PSMS - A. muscaria is seen around here, but is European, and more likely to show up around imported plants, where it is seen rarely. Amanita chrysoblema is our local one, very common, and found near native plants. This is what the DNA is telling people, even if 99 percent of the field guides would not tell us that. . . yet!
2. Giant Funnel Cap
I didn't check this one, but it's giant.... it's a funnel... it's white... and the stem details looked similar to what I saw on an identification site. Apparently they are edible, although goodness, I'm not pushing my luck with any of these! They do stand out, so if I see one in the future, it would go through a more rigorous ID, and a second or third opinion. It was just fun to find something that big.
3. Turkey Tail Mushroom
This one was fun - a pretty common bracket fungus that lives up to its name, looking like a fanned out tail.
4. "Did it smell like cucumbers?"
Hm?
This was the question I got to help narrow it down. This. . . is exactly why I started this nonsense. I mean. Not just cucumber smells, but because of the deep dive it would take to identify some of the things over the course of the year. It gives me a window into the world of people who *know this kind of stuff*. I will smell my little brown mushrooms from now on, and I may even try to do a spore print, but . . . yowzers, I got 5 mushrooms in before falling over this cliff.
I am unlikely to become a serious mushroom person, but I want to be able to speak their language at least a little.
To be continued. . .
