This has been a banner summer for mushrooms at the preserve. We've had every color of the rainbow and all sorts of wild shapes, of which these photos are just a small, tame-looking selection. I'm not going to try to identify them here.
Remember that the mushroom is only the reproductive structure of a potentially massive, threadlike underground fungus that we have no way of seeing without destroying in the process of removing the soil and roots it lives among. They may be the largest creatures on earth, and they apparently are more closely related to animals than to plants.
I recently read Michael Pollan's new book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, and he wrote a chapter about the risks and choices of foraging for mushrooms. In addition to the discussion of the cuisine, I gained an appreciation for the fungi that create mushrooms.
Although some mushrooms feed on dead tissue, others have a symbiotic relationship with live plant tissue. An awful lot of forest life as we know it depends on this association, since these "mycorrhizal" fungi make soil nutrients soluble to the plants (which the plants cannot do themselves) in return for the plant roots returning some sugars, the result of photosynthesis that the plant can do but the fungus cannot.
I am also amazed by how much a mushroom changes in appearance over the course of a few days. If I was not visiting the same spot to look at them I might sometimes assume it was a different species!
I recommend Michael Pollan's book (for reasons much broader than the chapter on mushrooms) and I urge you to visit the preserve to see some of these mushrooms for yourself.
