We had two large hornet nests in the spruce that overhangs our back deck, here at Anchovy World Headquarters. Normally, I'm a live and let live kind of guy when it comes to wasps and hornets, but this was beginning to be a problem, so I called in the experts. They use long poles, spray insecticide foam into the nest from the end of the pole, then cut the nest out of the tree. We thought there was only one, but once that was down, we saw clearly the bigger one in behind it.
Memphis and I visited some forests this morning, stumbling about among the branches and fallen logs and stumps, looking for mushrooms. I picked some lobsters and a few chanterelles and some boletes. Memphis came out covered in burrs that had to be oh so gently combed out when we got home. We both had a great time though. Wandering through the forest with your pup is a top notch activity in my book, and finding dinner is a bonus.
It was a rainy morning where I was, but in the forest I hardly noticed. I could hear the rain more than feel it.
Update on the big bolete in the photos... It didn't stain blue, so I tasted it and I thought it didn't taste bitter. Salvelinas suggested I have Tuffy P taste it as well. He has pointed out to me that he can't detect bitter very well, and needs someone else to test boletes for him. Tuffy P tasted a bit of the bolete and said it was bitter, very bitter. Funny huh? Rats.
Thanks to East Texas Red for sending me this article about turbines to be built in the Sound of Islay to provide power for the island, including the distilleries that make those oh so tasty Islay scotches. Now I'll be a green scotch drinker when next I pick up a bottle of Lagavulin.
Thunderstorms are expected in Toronto, but also up where I look for mushrooms. If we get some good quantities of rain today and tomorrow, I think I'll spend Saturday morning stumbling about in a forest.
The other day I wrote about some similarities between my experiences fly fishing and mushroom hunting. Another similarity between the activities has to do with the development of focused observation.
In fly fishing, after a while, you're out there on stream and you start to notice the bugs and how the trout are reacting to them quite clearly. I recall being on the Crowsnest River one late September day several years ago. It was snowing and it was my first time on the river and I hadn't seen any trout. Then I noticed a flash in the stream and another one, and as I concentrated on looking into the water, I started to see a number of trout, angled down, grabbing nymphs from the bottom, flashing as they turned. There are sometimes clues to the behavior of the trout: a splashy rise, a tail rise, seeing the back of the trout, a gentle pop or a slurp on the surface. The same thing happens over and over and at a certain point it is clear what is happening, what stage of the life cycle of the insect the trout is eating. And they can be very very selective.
In mushroom hunting, you need to train your eye to pick up on clues in much the same way. There is a lot of forest to look at, but you're looking for mushrooms, not just looking around. The first time I found chanterelles, they were around me but I couldn't see them, but once I picked a few, I started to see the telltale bits of yellow peeking out from under leaves. One of the things you have to learn how to do is to slow down. If you don't slow down and focus around you, you won't see what is there for you to see.
My brother has a knack for finding lobster mushrooms. These are curious items, these lobster mushrooms. They are actually the result of a mold attacking a mushroom, turning it lobster red, and transforming an unpalatable mushroom into a tasty edible along the way. I've never found one, yet going to the same forests, my brother finds them almost every time out. They reveal themselves, he tells me, as little bits of red under leaves, and sometimes as just bumps in the leafy surface of the forest floor. Salvalinas has somehow or another learned see those bumps, or find those little bits of red that I don't yet see. I expect that once I find a few of them, I'll start to see the signs in a similar way.
Occasionally, of course, nature hits you over the head, no subtlety involved. For instance, there was the day we found the large chicken mushroom. We were walking through the woods and I saw something screaming red. I thought somebody had left a red hunting jacket in the woods and that was what I had glimpsed. It turned out to be pounds of chicken mushroom, bright red-orange on top and yellow on the bottom. Impossible for even a newbie like me to miss.
I've spent a good deal of time over the years chasing trout, which has brought me into contact with any number of forests. For me though, for many years, forests were places trout streams flowed through. I was more interested in the character of the streams than the character of the forest.
There are some fly fishers who have involved themselves in the phenology of the business to the point where looking at the forest plants provides clues to the insect activity and so to the trout behavior. I've spent lots of time watching trout go after insects and birds go after insects and I understand some of those relationships pretty well. Of course the evidence of that is tying up the right fly pattern for conditions and actually catching some trout. I don't make the associations though, between what's happening in the forest and what's happening on stream. Enthusiasts with that interest might enjoy a fascinating little book called The Phenological Fly, by Bob Scammel.
This summer, since I've been learning about identifying mushrooms, especially the edible ones, I've been paying a lot more attention to forests. It became obvious fairly quickly that my poor ability to identify conifers was a huge liability. Some mushrooms tend to grow around hemlock, for instance, but I couldn't pick out a hemlock in the woods. Some boletes apparently prefer Norway spruce to black spruce. Do you know the difference? There are lots of opportunities to learn in the forest.
As I've been wandering about various forests, looking for and at fungi, I've begun to characterize forests based on the mix of trees (pine plantation, mixed hardwoods, mixed forest with hemlock, hardwoods with plenty of oak, and so on), and based on other factors as well. Some forests are easier to walk in than others, and some are just about inpenetrable. Some are on dry ground, while others are what I've come to call "malarial bog", a loose term describing just about any damp mosquito-infested forest. I know of a couple forests that never seem to really dry out, even without rain.
I've started to really pay attention to where I am in a forest, because looking for mushrooms takes you off the trails much of the time. Of course, sometimes the mushrooms are closer to the trail than you expect. The other day I found several chanterelles smack in the middle of a trail. I guess this is like the fly fisher who regularly catches good trout at the bridge pool. I've also started to pay attention to specific conditions within the larger forest. On Saturday, I was out with my brother and we found a gentle trough with a hill rising on both sides. This spot showed us quite a variety of mushrooms, including some curious and tasty mushrooms known as "Sweet Tooth" or "Hedgehog". Further up the hill on either side, there seemed to be nothing. Yet it wasn't the lowness of the trough that created the right conditions. On the other side of the trail, we looked through forest which was as low and lower with no success. I suppose with experience, I'll be able to identify the right subsets of conditions for various types of mushrooms. For now, although I'm learning quickly, there is a lot of hit and miss going on.
This is similar to my early experiences fly fishing. I recall thinking, well there are rising trout, I'll try a dry fly. Years later, I would look at the same scene and think something like, the trout are on the isonychia duns in shallow water, knowing the fish had followed the isonychia swimming nymphs into the shallows where they emerged and became mayflies, and were gobbling up the big adult flies before they were able to take flight. With experience comes detail.
Our area experienced very severe thunderstorms today which dumped a remarkable amount of water down in just a few hours. Driving home from work, I couldn't get through the underpass south of Horner on Dixie, Thirtieth or Kipling due to 2-3 feet of water under the bridge, but finally discovered that Brown's Line was OK.
The photos are the Anchovy Swamp, formerly known as our backyard. I may go out there after dinner with a fly rod if there's an evening mayfly hatch and see if I can hook into a big grass trout. The good news is that our basement is dry!
The Storms are on the Ocean (Mother Maybelle Carter)
Shelter from the Storm (Bob Dylan, live 1976)
Stormy Monday Blues (T-Bone Walker)
For those outside of Ontario, today was a holiday for us, sometimes known as "Civic holiday" and sometimes known as Simcoe Day. I took off on a scouting mission, checking out local forests for mushroom potential. I didn't expect to find much, since we didn't get the rain I had hoped for, but I'm up for any excuse for a hike in the woods.
I visited one hiking trail that I had been on many years ago, maybe even back in university. The forests didn't hold much mushroom potential there though, at least not on the section of trail I accessed. I drove up to another section of public forest, part of the York Regional Forest group of forests, and this was another spot I had visited some years ago. A few fellow painters and I had stopped there to make some landscape watercolour paintings. As I recall, though, we didn't stay long because there was a lot of poison ivy in there. There is still a lot of poison ivy in there, but I managed to avoid coming home with a rash.
I did find some mushrooms in there, but none that I could identify as tasty edibles. If I can't identify them as mushrooms I know are good to eat, I assume they aren't edible.
I found a third tract of forest on the way back, and just took a brief look at it for future reference. In all, I enjoyed a pleasant morning in the woods and came away with some intelligence for future trips.
I decided to take a course on mushroom identification offered by the University of Toronto school of Continuing Studies this fall. There are four in-class sessions and two field trips to a forest. Most of the time, when I want to learn about something, I go about it on my own. I suppose learning to play the squeezebox was an exception, in that I sought out a teacher to help me out.
There are other ways to learn about this. Toronto has a Mycological Society and members do forays out into the woods and then identify the various fungi they found. Perhaps next year I'll join. For this year, I think the course along with weekly trips to the woods will help me get a good grounding.
Mushroom hunting and fly fishing (another activity I've been involved with for many years) have something in common. Both involve learning about relationships in nature. In fly fishing, we observe what bugs the trout are eating and at what stage of their life-cycles. Sometimes, approaching a trout stream, the activity of birds like swallows point to what's going on in the water. Some fly fisherman are even adept at predicting insect emergences based on the plants they see leafing or blooming. Mushroom hunters learn about the relationships between particular trees and mushrooms, and some mushrooms, such as morels, appear seasonally for relatively short periods.
For me, learning about the natural world is really interesting, and there is so much more to learn. I can identify quite a number of trees, for instance, but show me a group of conifers and I'll have a hard time naming them all. The same thing goes for birds. I can identify quite a few common ones, but I've barely scratched the surface. So this year, I'm starting to learn about mushrooms. I've discovered that to do that, I need to be able to identify certain trees, so putting my mind to that too. I have a field guide to Ontario trees in the trunk along with my field guide to North American mushrooms.
Along the way, all this is giving me and my side-kick Memphis a good excuse to go for walks in the woods, and I'm enjoying the exercise as well.
I had been hoping for plenty of rain over the past couple days to help fruit some wild mushrooms. There was a little the other night, but it may not be enough to really get things going. Nevertheless, I'm going to take Memphis out for a run in the forest in the morning, and I will bring along my basket and my field guide just in case.
Memphis loves our trips to the forest, and I'm enjoying them too!
I found this single mushroom, not in some forest but on my neighbour's lawn while I was taking Memphis out for a walk. After we returned, I carefully removed it from the ground. The cap was perhaps 4 inches across. There was no visible vulva on the base of the stem. There was a ring with the remnants of a veil. It had gills that were brown and close and not attached to the stem. I tried to bruise the cap and saw no evidence of bruising of any colour. I sliced a bit off the bottom of the stem and there was no bleeding or any yellow. It smelled, well, mushroomy, with a hint of anise. I took a spore print, which you see in the picture. My brother the trout, Salvelinas Fontinalis, helped me go through the identification process.
This mushroom appears to be an Agaricus, but I'm not sure which of the many varieties it is. My guess was Agaricus campestris, the meadow mushroom.
Tonight I made a mushroom omelette as follows:
I chopped up the mushroom and gently sauteed it in salted butter. Then I beat up two eggs with a fork and dropped them into a hot buttered pan, moving the pan around to spread the eggs. As the omelette solidified, I added the sauteed mushrooms to the middle, and folded the two sides over the middle. A little salt and pepper and it was ready. I enjoyed it with a cold beer.
The mushroom was very tasty, sort of like a concentration of white mushrooms. Very nice.
One of the two main stems of this maple crashed down in the storm today. This is about 3 blocks from Anchovy World Headquarters. On closer examination, it's amazing the tree stayed up as long as it did. Well over half the trunk was rotted and along the top where the trunks join, there are several large bracket fungi feeding off it. The neighbourhood weekend lumberjacks cleared the street with chain saws early this afternoon, and the street was passable again by the time the city managers came by and put up some pylons. There were a number of houses in the neighbourhood that had trees damaged from the storm today. The tree in the photograph was the most dramatic I saw.
My brother has been an avid mushroom gatherer for some time now, and he's been telling me stories of bringing home baskets of tasty edibles. At times he collects more than he and his wife can eat, so he dries them in a dehydrator to use during the winter in soups and stews.
When Tuffy P and I expressed interest in learning about mushrooms, Salvelinas offered to show us some good mushroom spots and teach us a little bit. This was Canada Day. The forests were still damp after a recent rain, and Salvelinas expected to see a good selection of summer mushrooms, but nada, nothing, zip. Not a bit discouraged, I wanted to go again yesterday. Tuffy P. couldn't come this time, and Salvelinas wasn't sure he wanted to go as conditions were not as good, but we went anyway.
Well, again there were very few mushrooms around. We tried to identify some weird kind of slime and found a small number little brown mushrooms that might have been fairy ring mushrooms. We even went to a forest that stays damp even in fairly dry conditions, but nothing. Salvelinas isn't sure why, since last year at this time, he was gathering a selection of summer edibles. Maybe it's the cool nights we've been having. Still, it was a learning opportunity for me. I got a chance to wander about in some forests I haven't been in before. Salvelinas helped me with some tree identification as well. Some mushrooms are associated with certain kinds of trees.
I'm now equipped with pocket knife, gathering basket, walking stick (which my friend Chuck made for me some time ago) and field guide. Salvelinas suggested that I need to be able to confidently identify the edibles myself, without having to depend on (trust) anybody else's judgment. I've learned that you need to look at a number of different things to identify a mushroom, and that some mushrooms are much harder to identify than others. One of the key ways to identify a variety is to take a spore print after bringing the mushrooms home. The field guide describes the spore print for each variety.
I've learned that you have to be very sure of your identification, since we do have some deadly mushrooms in Ontario as well as quite a lot of varieties that will make you sick if you eat them. There are also some varieties that make some people sick but which other people can eat with apparent impunity.
I'm not dissuaded by the lack of mushrooms so far. I like the fact that it is not fully predictable, and as well, I like the fact that the activity requires knowledge gained with experience and study over time. The reward-tasty edibles-is pretty attractive as well. I'm looking forward to making up a wild mushroom omelette.
The added benefit of hunting mushrooms is that it is a great opportunity to give Memphis a chance to romp through a forest. Yesterday, we came across a large spring-fed pond. This pond was dug out by the forestry people, and has a pump-house so it can be used for irrigation. One spring tumbles down the hillside into the pond. Memphis and Scout has a great time there, along with another dog, a lab that came down with his human. This is where Memphis learned about swimming!
Yesterday, we were in forests not far from Barrie. This made it challenging to get home, as there was a serious incident on Bayfield St. yesterday in which two policemen were stabbed before shooting the stabber. A section of Bayfield St. was blocked off along with the ramp to highway 400. I had to detour around quite a way to get out of town.
This curious plant is Indian Pipe. We saw a few clumps of it in the forest this morning.
Today we met up with my brother the trout, Salvelinas Fontinalis, at a forest not far from Barrie Ontario. Our goal was to forage about for edible mushrooms and at the same time, give our pup Memphis and his dog Scout an opportunity to romp in the woods. My brother is very knowledgeable about mushrooms and he had predicted that today, after quite a bit of rain, we would score some good edibles. Fortunately we had a great time walking around in the woods with the dogs because edible mushrooms were not to be found today. We did find a few oyster mushrooms but they were well past their prime. Salvelinas gave us a lesson in what to look for and where to look and we wandered about, looking around stumps and dead trees. We tried three different locations, all slightly different types of forest, but no edibles. Next time, hopefully we'll be more fortunate. Tuffy and I and Memphis had a blast this morning!
Why am I hoping for rain? Well, my brother the trout, Salvelinas Fontinalis, offered to take us (me, Tuffy P and Memphis) mushroom picking on Saturday if we get the predicted rain over the next couple days. I'm looking forward to this. I don't know much about mushrooms, but my brother has been picking and eating them for a few years now and hasn't keeled over yet. Experience says a lot in the mushroom picking business.
Over the past week or two, I've noticed more and more birds around the house. This morning, when I walked out the door, I was greeted by a symphony of bird-song. Delightful. Spring is in the air.
Scientists have observed an unusual swarm of earthquakes in Yellowstone Park. More than 250 tremors occurred over three days.
Yellowstone is an active volcanic and tectonic area, but apparently these tremors are very unusual. It isn't known if this is a precursor to more significant activity.
Thanks to East Texas Red for passing this along.
PS I didn't know earthquakes came in swarms. How do we characterize groups of the following:
geese
cattle
alligators
mosquitos
crows
turtles
deer
bear
ants
baboons
kangaroos
larks
lions
oxen
peacocks
rats
walruses
