The 2016 Rogerson Foray

Over the past weekend, I returned to the annual Rogerson Foray of the Connecticut-Westchester Mycological Association (COMA), the first mushroom club I ever joined. It’s a great chance to see familiar faces and cool mushrooms. I’m just posting a few photos right now; I’ll put up some more over the winter.

Here are Connie Borodenko and Igor Safonov, trying to figure out a bolete.

One of my favorite mushrooms is Lactarius chelidonium. It often shows some of the blues that its close relative L. indigo is famous for, but it gets greener and often shows some pink or orange as it gets older, and it thus has the distinction of being mistaken for both L. indigo and L. deliciosus. And that is something I love about it – you can never find two of them that are the same color.

Here are two that were found together on this year’s foray. The one on the left is bluish, and might be mistaken for L. indigo; but the one on the right is more green, and gives the game away.

The latex of this species is yellow… perhaps a dirty or brownish yellow. Peck gave the species its name because this reminded him of the yellow latex of the celandine flower, which is in the genus Chelidonium. Here you can see that their color varies subtly underneath as well:

Another striking and much more unusual mushroom that came in at the foray was Crepidotus cinnabarinus, found by John Michelotti. Although this mushroom is rarely collected, it’s not clear how rare it actually is, since it often fruits inside crevices in bark – it’s often only visible as a fleck of red inside a crack in the branch.

We also eat well! Here Ryan Bouchard, Gerry MacDonald, Emily Schmidt, and Morss Palmer reflect on some of the chicken mushroom that came in for mycophagy.