Mushroom Picking

Mushroom Picking Grows in Popularity - New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-F ... atics.html

HI,

I'm former past president of the Illinois Mycological Association aka Mushroom Club.

We meet at the North Park Village Nature Center (Pulaski just south of Peterson in Chicago) nine times a year, except for January, February and July, on the first Monday of the month at 7:30 PM. NOTE: we will not have a May meeting this year, because we have two meetings in April due to speaker availability

This is a great place to learn mushroom identification. Members bring fresh specimens to meetings. Forays are also great for learning how to find them as well as ID. While in the Chicago area, there are maybe 20-30 edibles, there are a lot more who are simply interesting and beautiful in their own right.

The San Francisco Club mentioned in this article is huge. They have had as many as 1000 members with a reliably active group of 100. This article touched on an issues we experience here: less and less legal opportunities to pick mushrooms.

Regards,

Mushroom hunter "massacre" claims 18 lives in Italy

MILAN (Reuters) – ...

Mountain rescuers say eager mushroom seekers are abandoning safety procedures as they don camouflage and hunt in darkness to protect coveted troves, la Repubblica newspaper reported on Sunday.

"There is too much carelessness. Too many people don't give a darn about the right rules and unfortunately this is the result," Gino Comelli, head of the Alpine rescue service in northwest Italy's Valle di Fassa, told the newspaper.

Seventeen people have died in nine days -- six in 48 hours alone -- mostly from sliding off steep, damp slopes in the northern mountains, la Repubblica said in a story headlined "the massacre of the mushroom hunters."

...

A combination of August thunderstorms and hot weather has led to a bumper mushroom crop that has drawn the first hunters of what is expected to be a boom season.

Ch. 2 had a lead-in story to their 10pm newscast where they implied that the deaths were due to eating wild mushrooms. Idiots. Ch. 2 news is going down the drain fast. Is this where Bill and Walter are going? They need help, in any case.

When I lived in Bavaria my wife and I spent an early morning harvesting wild mushrooms. We had the "hausfrau" of our apartment building inspect our haul, after which she deemed us "verruckt" (mad). She had us throw out the whole lot as most were poisonous varieties.