Mushrooming Resources
A beginners guide to getting started with identification
Michael W. Beug
Books:
After over 30 years of mushrooming, my book collection now numbers well over 100
mushroom books. You should arm your self with at least 2 or 3 good books to get started.
However, with any field guide, you often need more information than has been given to
be positive about your identification and you must remember that no field guide covers
more than a small percentage of all the mushrooms that you may encounter – so don’t
assume that your mushroom will be in any field guide – you may need a monograph of
the genus to identify your find – and even then you may have found a new species. Part
of the fun of mushrooming is the realization that you can still discover an unnamed
species – and will probably do so regularly if you collect in a poorly studied area. Never-
the-less, a good book written for your area will cover most of the distinctive
mushrooms that you will find.
Some of my favorite field guides include:
Arora, David. Mushrooms Demystified
The focus is on Northern California. David is a very entertaining writer and there is good
basic information on how to collect fungi. The coverage (over 2,000 species) is extensive
for a field guide. David has included the most common and abundant mushrooms in his
region and many of the species are found in many other parts of the country.
Bessette, Alan and Arleen, and Fischer, David. Mushrooms of Northeastern North
America
The coverage (nearly 1500 species) is of both the U. S. and Canada from the Northeast
through the Plains States and as far south as Tennessee and North Carolina. The
arrangement of the mushrooms by genus name rather than clustering mushrooms together
by family is a disadvantage.
Lincoff, Gary. The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Mushrooms
This compact book covers over 700 species from all of North America, with an emphasis
on mushrooms of North Eastern North America. The photographs were chosen by
editors unfamiliar with mushrooms and are not always characteristic of the species.
Moser, Meinhard. Keys to Agarics and Boleti
Once you get beyond the beginner’s stage, this is a great book to help key your find to
genus or species. It covers the difficult gilled mushrooms plus boletes and does not have
pictures. Finding a copy can be a challenge but it is worth it even though as with any field
guide, your mushroom may not be one of the included species.
Regional Field Guides:
Metzler, Susan and Van with Orson Miller, Jr. Texas Mushrooms
A handy pictoral guide for collecting in Texas.
McKenny, Margaret and Stuntz, Daniel revised and enlarged by Ammirati, Joe. The New
Savory Wild Mushroom
Covers 199 common mushrooms of the Pacific Northwest.
Weber, Nancy Smith and Smith, Alexander H. A Field Guide to Southern Mushrooms
Covers 241 species found in the South.
PACIFIC NORTHWEST KEY COUNCIL:
This group of dedicated amateur and professional mycologists has been working for just
over 30 years to produce keys for mushroom identification. We are not yet broadly
advertising where to get our materials on the web since the materials are under
development. However, you will still find our site to be a singularly powerful resource:
http://www.svims.ca/council/keys.htm
At this site, the introductory page gives you some background and shows which keys are
in printed form and which are available electronically. If you know which group your
mushroom falls into, and there is an electronic key available for that group, go straight to
the appropriate key and go to work on identifying your find. If you do not know the
genus of the mushroom, or the genus is not listed for your mushroom, go to the “Key to
Keys” and use that to try to figure out what you have. When you think you have figured
out the genus or the species, proceed to the section on mushroom descriptions. Note that
at the end of most mushroom descriptions, there is a way to connect to the web and see
illustrations of what you think you have found (you will eventually discover, however,
that some of the images you pull off of the web are not correctly identified, so use caution
and confirm your ID with another method, e.g. Matchmaker):
Gibson, Ian. Matchmaker
A fantastic must have CD that is used to key out gilled (and soon non-gilled) mushrooms
of the Pacific Northwest. This is an extremely comprehensive key where you type in the
most distinctive features of the mushroom you have and the computer creates a list of the
mushrooms with the closest match to that set of features. The CD covers every known
named species in the Pacific Northwest along with detailed descriptions. Many
photographers have contributed to the CD so thousands of mushroom images are
available. The last I checked Ian was still charging a mere $10 per copy. For ordering
information contact ig@islandnet.com. Note: Fungal Kingdom students received a special
bulk discount. If you send Ian your email address, every time Matchmaker is updated, he
will send you an email so that you can update electronically for free.
Electronic Materials:
Kou, Michael. www.mushroomexpert.com
This is a great website with beginners pages, tips on photography, identification
techniques, keys and mushroom descriptions with photographs.
Volk, Tom. www.TomVolkFungi.com
A very useful site with a range of information and a mushroom of the month feature
page.
Lincoff, Gary. www.nemf.org/files/lincoff
Another great site for beginners, focusing on the Northeast mushrooms. Advice on books,
lists of the best edible mushrooms of the region, information about deadly and other
poisonous mushrooms including some good rules on what not to do that are applicable
anywhere.
Beug, Michael. www.evergreen.edu/mushrooms
Gives you on-line access to 4 NAMA slide-tape programs that will help you get more
comfortable with the range and diversity of mushrooms to collect for the table and to
avoid. Includes “Introduction to Mushrooms”, “Introduction to Fall Mushrooms”,
“Truffles and other Spring Fungi”, “Poisonous and Hallucinogenic Mushrooms”. Each
program features 80 mushrooms with a picture and a little bit about the mushroom.
Wood, Michael www.mykoweb.com
One of the better mushroom sites on the web with descriptions of over 400 California
species and over 2,000 illustrations.
