What can smell like maple syrup, shellfish, chocolate, cinnamon or ammonia? What can look like undersea coral, brains, cat whiskers or smoking cauldrons? What can appear as small as your fingertip, but is actually the largest living organism on earth?
What can cause some of your neighbors to spend hours in the woods looking for them, while also be the bane of those who want an immaculate yard?
Fungus! Fungi! Rumous iglumous! Toadstools! Mushrooms!
It seems many want to eat them; at the same time many fear even touching one.
Not Matt Welter. He has studied mushrooms, fungi, lichens and slimemolds for 25 years, and his take on them is, “You don’t have to eat them to enjoy them.”
“I started studying them up on Isle Royale and in the Apostles when I was park ranger,” Welter said. “Being stuck out on an island, it seemed like something fun to study, and the more I looked, the more kinds of fungi I found.”
Welter typically takes up a new natural area to study mushrooms each year, trying to document as many species as possible, returning once every two to three weeks, even in the winter.
“There are some unique areas in Northeast Wisconsin,” he said, “and the more habitats and kinds of dead wood in that place, the more unique the mushrooms.”
This year Welter found one of the best places in Wisconsin: the Navarino Nature Center.
“Some may look at this place and say, ‘You ought to clean it up and clear it out.’ I say it is an amazingly rare gem for fungus,” he said. “In one morning alone I found over 65 species of mushrooms within less than 50 yards of the nature center – over 15 of them on a single log.”
This is why Welter is hosting a mushroom hike at 9 a.m. Saturday to help show visitors and mushroom enthusiasts alike just what can be found in this resource.
“I don’t go fast,” he said. “In fact, my pace is usually about half a mile an hour, but for this day I will pick it up to catch some of the rarer areas.”
Welter said areas that are in between habitats have some of the rarest mushrooms.
“Last week I found scarlet Frost’s Boletes, which I have never seen before alongside several species of Amanita mushrooms, one of which has never been documented in Wisconsin,” he said.
Of course, the question is did Welter eat any of these?
“No, I do have a few that I like to eat, and if we find those, I will show them; if they’re good, maybe even try them,” he said. “But they’re things more fascinating than eating.
“Imagine finding a mushroom that glows in the dark, or one that is yellow but instantly turns blue when you touch it, or finding a troop of tiny cups that look like birds nest, including the eggs inside.”
To participate in the hike, call the Navarino Nature Center at 715-758-6999. Space is limited.
Categories
