Searching for clues

For the past few weeks my photographic life has been dominated by fungi. I’ve spent so long staring at fungi that I see them in my dreams. There are other side effects too, such as an insatiable desire to eat fungi. I don’t eat wild fungi because they’re already under too much pressure from picking, and even worse, people who smash them on sight because they’re “poisonous”. But I do eat fungi, so on Friday night it’s off to Waitrose for a foraging trip followed by a weekend of fried mushrooms and garlic, mushroom pate, and mutton and mushroom pie.

Apart from a few easy ones, identifying fungi is real detective work, sniffing out clues such as that faint whiff of rhubarb from a Cortinarius umbrinolens. Thirty years ago I had a scare in a restaurant when “wild mushroom soup” turned my lips and tongue numb for several hours. That’s not the reason I don’t eat wild mushrooms now, but if you do, obviously you need to know what you’re doing. The difference between a tasty Agaricus and a toxic Cortinarius is vanishingly small. In this case, the yellow pores (rather than gills) on the underside of this big Bay Bolete were an important feature, but the blue bruising was useful confirmation.

Bay Bolete, Boletus badius. Sony DSC-HX20V f3.2 4.7mm 1/30 ISO 320


http://wp.me/pieTR-n5


Thanks to everyone who commented on and starred my spider web blip yesterday. Funny how the least planned shots seem to attract the most attention.