Mushroom Identification
Some Helpful Hints about Mushroom Identification
Mushroom identification is vitally important if you are determining, for example, if a particular species is edible or not, and what properties it possesses. It’s not as easy as you might think, and you need to be very detailed in your information-gathering.
Once you collect your mushrooms and you have written down important points about their unique features, you can begin comparing your descriptions with descriptions found in mushroom identification guide books. You can’t have too many guides; some may have information for you that is lacking in others.
The easiest method of mushroom identification is through using scientific guidelines that can be found in many mushroom guides. You will use what the guides call “keys” - selecting specific traits of each mushroom until you can identify them. Comparing your mushrooms to pictures in books may sound easy, but it is actually the least accurate means of mushroom identification. Photos can’t show you each detail about the mushrooms in them, so you may make comparisons and simply select one that is the same color as one of yours, for instance. Using keys allows you to hone in on many aspects of the mushroom’s structure until you pin down its actual type.
After you have used the keys to determine some of the possibilities for identification, be sure to compare carefully the description you wrote for your mushroom to those in the guides to mushroom identification. This process is in some ways like fingerprinting – comparing whorls and swirls, and arriving at common points. Each mushroom that you picked and brought home needs to be matched to an individual mushroom in the guide books, and your objectivity was maintained because you wrote down your descriptions before you read some in the guides that may have sounded similar to yours.
Many times, despite your best efforts, the identification process will not succeed. Mushroom identification is somewhat of an art form, and sometimes identifying a particular mushroom may be hard - and sometimes not possible at all. This may be frustrating to outdoorsmen who use bird guides and tree guides and can find what they are looking for with relative ease. But there are many more variables where mushrooms are concerned. When it comes to mushrooms, you may need to use a microscope, and the exact number of mushroom species is actually not even known.
After you practice mushroom identification, you will at least be able to identify some of the mushrooms you bring home, but probably not all of them. And the more practice you get, the more species you will be able to identify.
If you find yourself getting frustrated, take heart – you’re not alone. Experts sometimes have to give up on identifying a particular specimen. It happens to the best of us.