Mushroom Monday - Some Sightings and A Warning

Here are some finds for #mushroommonday

I found a slew of horse mushrooms aka Agaricus arvensis. These are edible but beware the yellow stainer lookalike.

Horse mushrooms are quite similar to meadow mushrooms aka Agaricus campestris but these have a slightly more anise smell to them and are smaller.

They have pink gills that don't attach to the stem and have a smooth stem with not much of a bulb base.

As they age the gills turn chocolate brown. I try to only harvest these in clean areas because they tend to absorb toxins from the soil around them.

Here is an old Pluteus cervinus aka deer shield mushroom.

Note the brown color and the conical shape with a bump in the middle. The stem is also fairly thin.

They also grow out of wood and I usually find them growing on fallen trees with moss on them. They are edible too but not very choice and they tend to grow alone so its not worth harvesting them.

Look at this massive polypore. I thought it might be Meripilus giganteus at first.

The massive size seems right but the shape seems wrong. So it is still a mystery polypore for now.

Now for a warning https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/york-amish-family-of-11-including-infant-poisoned-by-toxic-mushrooms-officials/ar-AA1scgit

Apparently an Amish family at a bunch of poisonous mushrooms they harvested near their home. None of the news articles mentioned the exact species of mushroom they foraged. Fortunately they all survived so it mush have been a mushroom of lesser toxin like say a Ramaeria formosa which the Amish are known to eat. But all the field guides say it causes gastric upset, maybe there is a tricky way to cook it to remove the toxins and they forgot to cook it correctly... Who knows maybe I'll learn what bad mushroom they ate in future articles.

That's all for now, thanks for looking :-)