Sunday, July 01, 2007

The FUNgi of Letterboxing


This Spring, I offered a special stamp to anyone who found morels and sent me a picture and information on their good fortune. Only one person, JennyJ, was fortunate to hunt down her own patch of the delightful treats and claim the reward. Congratulations, I knew there was a mushroom hunter or two among the letterboxing ranks.

Last month, I received this photo from the Happy Wanderer and decided to extend my offer of reward. If you think you see any of the mushrooms featured in my wild mushroom series, please take a photo and let me know where and what you think you have found. If you have made a proper identification, you will be rewarded in true letterboxing fashion. Include the appropriate insert (like Happy Wanderer did ) and impress me even more.

By the way, if you are out there Happy Wanderer, please email me to claim your reward. I had major computer problems in the middle of the June and lost all of my old email and addresses.

Happy hunting,
Ahistory

6 comments:

Jenny said...

Ahistory has a great fungi blog - lots of info and helpful photos. An aside - the Natural Events calendar has a really nice pic of Chicken of the Woods this month.

Unknown said...

thanks stan for informing us of proper mushrooms! While boxing we have seen a few and now I know what kind they are - but I hadn't taken any pictures of them - bummer!

Fox-fyr said...

And I cam across four different kinds of mushrooms today while at Jenny J's Mid-Mo Mystery box. I took photos of some of them but am still not technological enough (and also don't slow down enough) to have figured out how to download them yet. I don't think any of them were in the mushroom series boxes, but they were all really neat, especially the bright orange and yellow ones growing on the ground (there were tons of them), and the single big white one whose photo I snapped after dark (it takes a while to walk that whole trail).

ahistory said...

Fox-fyr, interesting info there. Although I did not officially include chanterelles (my most favorite mushroom of all) in the series because of a poisonous look-a-like, what you describe sounds very promising. If you send me an email with a little more detail about the bright orange and yellow mushrooms growing from the ground, and I can verify that they are indeed what I love, the special reward will be yours as well.

ahistory

Fox-fyr said...

I finally came across some Chicken of the Woods the other day, growing on an old log in an area i did not expect to find any mushrooms as it was full of vinca minor (the ivy-like groundcover that is often planted near cemeteries and other places where people desire low maintenance).
Very yummy, and it does kind of taste like chicken, especially in the texture. I think I still like the chanterelles better though.

ahistory said...

Chanterelles are my favorite of all the wild mushrooms I have found. I prefer them even more so than morels, though morels are more fun to hunt since they do not show up in such abundance as chants and there is sooo much competition from other morel hunters.
This may change though, I am still trying to find the most prized mushroom of all, The King, so to speak. That is the King Bolete or porcini mushroom. they say it grows in MO but I have yet to find one. There are a bunch of boletes and many are very similar and hard to ID without using chemical agents. But some day I will stumble across one. Keep an eye for them if you are hiking amongst the pine woods out at Mark Twain.