Meet NYC's Fungus Hunters: Club Seeks Mushrooms In Heart Of City
NEW YORK CITY — It’s a cold winter morning in Randall’s Island, months before “coronavirus” or "social distancing" became common vocabulary, and a group of 30-some people is fixated on the ground.
There, on a splintered log, is an outgrowth of little brown polyps, like miniature corals. A fungus— but, thrillingly, no one knows yet what kind.
It's the New York Mycological Society’s final organized walk of the season — and may end up being its last in a long time as members of this little-known club devoted to fungi grapple with whether to cancel their entire 2020 schedule.
The group has been meeting remotely on Zoom, with members taking turns offering informal talks on everything from polypores to pyrenomycetes. Other times, they meet virtually to help one another identify the mushrooms they’ve found on solo walks.
As the morel season begins — one of the most exciting and delicious of the year for mushroom devotees — the club members are forced to hunt for them alone.
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On our walk in Randall’s Island, in those before times, attendees break off into groups and head into different trail heads.
It’s been a dry few weeks, long-time member Ethan Crenson notes, so the mushrooms seem reluctant to peek out. On a walk several weeks prior he remarked that, biologically, mushrooms are more closely related to humans than plants. Today, as he holds up a flat, burger-shaped fungus, I struggle to see the resemblance.
Members of the New York Mycological Society have been examining fungus all across the city since the 1950s, when famed experimental composer John Cage founded the club.
Cage’s entrance into the world of mushrooms was a matter of survival. A child of the Depression, he learned to identify and find mushrooms to eat when other food was scarce. Later, he likened the experience of hunting mushrooms to searching for hidden sounds for his music.
Today’s members pay $15 annually to walk with the group on weekend hunts, attend lectures by experts, meet for mid-week identification sessions and attend the occasional mushroom-themed culinary evening.
“This is actually the best time for amateur science, thanks to all the sharing technologies,” says Sigrid Jakob, who’s been a member for four years and has quickly established herself as one of the group's self-taught experts.
She’s taken some mycological classes, but her identification skills largely stem from dialogue with other enthusiastic novices on community sites like iNaturalist and Facebook. She now owns two microscopes to better examine her findings.
The weekend hunts are also a great way to de-stress, according to Marissa Hill, who has been walking with the group for several months.
“You have to actually be present,” she says.
Throughout the walk, members pick up curious bumps on logs and red-tinged slime molds,
separating them from where they grow with pocket knives they pull from their coats.
Dennis Aita, the club’s vice president, grabs the magnifying glass dangling from his neck on a chain to peer more closely at the specimen as it's passed along. Everyone agrees that it’s probably a Psathyrella, but they can’t be sure until it’s under a microscope.
We walk further and discover a few more mushrooms: a blewet, a Panellus serotinus, something small and cup-like that everyone is excited to examine later. Finally, I spot something: a domed beige mushroom cap, precipitously balanced on a skinny brown stem.
“Nice — perfect LBM,” Jakob says. It means “little brown mushroom,” she adds, or mycological lingo for an unidentified, average mushroom.
After the hunt, members head to Icahn Stadium and set their mushrooms on a table. Some pace down the length of the table, lifting and turning over specimens. Two microscopes are set up at the end of the table, and a line forms to look at a few prized finds.
Aita, the club’s vice president, and Crenson, the long-time member, give brief presentations on a few chosen mushrooms. Crenson runs his finger along the leathery top of a blewit, one of the few edibles in today’s haul, then flips it to reveal the nearly lavender gills on its underside. Aita holds up a golf ball-sized mushroom with a beige cap and tight brown gills. He sniffs it and nods knowingly: “Agaricus,” he says, and the mushroom is passed down to be sniffed by the others.
As one woman shows off a hen of the woods mushroom, several members suggest risotto recipes.
One little girl, here with her mother, tugs on my sleeve and extends one very small, flat mushroom into my hand.
“Hi,” she says, breathlessly, and offers me her magnifying glass. “Do you want to see something really cool?”
This article originally appeared on the New York City Patch
