Mushrooms of Durant

Sunday, 26 August, 2012 — photo raleigh nature

Robin and I visited Raleigh’s Durant Nature Park yesterday, taking the Border Trail through the woods. With all of the recent rains and cooling weather, much of the forest floor was liberally sprinkled with several varieties of mushroom.

I’m not a mycolophile, just a general appreciator of nature, and it was amazing to see quite different mushrooms than what shows up on our neighbor’s front lawn or in our back yard.

While researching what I took pictures of, I stumbled across a site that helps people with mushroom identification. Search the page for “Id #43”, and you’ll see the scariest and stupidest thing I’ve read in some while:

Those look like mushrooms I found on horse manure in central California. They had purple-black or black spores. I ate one and if gave me pain right below my throat for a few days. It felt like there was a stone in my chest.

Knowing that some mushrooms are deadly poisonous, I’m surprised anyone would eat any mushroom not from the grocery store without being damn sure what they were eating. Me, I’ll probably just be appreciating the visual beauty of these fungi.