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Join a local 'Fungus Federation' type organization and learn from experienced mushroom hunters.
It's very easy to fuck up when you're trying to just learn from a book. Especially make sure you know how to take proper spore prints and until you are completely confident that you can recognize the local type in your area, verify it with experts. Just comparing photos will NOT result in an accurate identification. More often than not, the mushrooms you find will 'sort of' look like this photo or that photo. Accurate spore prints are the first step in identifying shrooms.
There is a common shroom hunter saying, "there are bold mushroom hunters, and there are old mushroom hunters. But there are no old, bold mushroom hunters."
Also, the best advice that is usually given is learn how to positively identify the bad mushrooms before the good.
After 2 years of mushroom hunting there are only 2, maybe 3 types of mushrooms that I feel confident about picking and eating in my area and even then I'm ultra-paranoid and double and triple check what I've got.
Don't just go picking willy-nilly. Fungus is nothing to be impulsive about. 
That being said, the book 'Mushrooms Demystified' by David Arora is considered THE bible by most of the hunters I know.
Something else to keep in mind is that a good number of wild mushroom related deaths are usually due to people who travel and pick mushrooms that look like choice mushrooms from their part of the woods. Unfortunately, they can have different properties in different areas and without really being careful you can end up dead.
[ 28-01-2002: Message edited by: Lothar Tuppan ] |
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