At home in the woods

One of the challenges of trying to learn mushrooms’ names is that they keep changing.  By the time a book is published, the mushroom’s name may have been popped from one genus into another — and sometimes back again.  And sometimes they just change the name altogether based on new studies.

So species’ names can be a nightmare to get right!

Remember the purple mushroom I posted a photo of a few days ago?  I thought I had the name aced.  Then Dave, the mushroom expert on my board wrote this:

Small orange mushroom–whose name I don’t know yet. 🙂

There is a southern NA species that looks just like Cortinarius iodes, except it isn’t. The name is Cortinarius iodiodes (not kidding), which means “looks like Cortinarius iodes.” The difference between the two species is strictly academic.

We’ve been going back and forth trying to identify this yellow suillus.  The concensus is that it’s probably a Chicken Fat Suillus (Suillus americanus), even though it is supposed to be very slimy.  And the ones

Suillus americanus (Chicken Fat Suillus)

I’ve found are not at all slimy.  Also, going by the color descriptions in the books doesn’t help a lot.

The following is from Michael Kuo’s Mushroom Expert site:

… depending on the amount of sunlight and the precipitation the color of individual fruiting bodies varied from one weather period to the next (even in a single day).

Or as Dave Fischer, the author of Edible Wild Mushrooms of North America, once emailed me in response to my question about why one of my mushroom photos didn’t look like the same mushroom in his book: “They don’t know that they are supposed to look exactly like the ones in the book.”  😀