D.I.Y. Mycoblitz

This extreme misunderstanding demands some sort of effort to sort it all out. After looking at mushrooms for a few years now, I thought I would give it try. But the problem is too large - you need to break it down.

If all the mushrooms in the world are too much to try and understand, well then, how about something smaller? What about all the mushrooms in California? No. How about the Bay Area? Still too big. I needed something smaller to start with, and somewhere close to home.

I ended up with the idea of a small hike, two to three miles, somewhere close enough to home. The Los Trancos open space preserve in Palo Alto is only a fifteen minute drive from home for me, and has a good mixed hardwood forest starting only a few hundred yards from the parking lot. To give understanding mushrooms a shot, I figured I’d start with this.

But there is a problem: as we all know, the gathering of mushrooms in a preserve is against the rules, and not something I could then talk about doing after-wards. At the urging of John Brown, I decided to try and go legit. I contacted the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District (www.openspace.org) about a permit to gather mushrooms for a survey. After some discussion, and showing them examples of photos and lists from the Albion forays, they agreed to grant me a permit to study the mushrooms of the Los Trancos preserve for educational purposes, and provide all information to them at the end of the season in April.

For this season I have been going up to the Los Trancos preserve about twice a month, doing the same hike each time, and trying to gather a few specimens of each mushroom observed. Then I will photograph the mushrooms, and try my best to ID the specimens. I am trying not to limit myself, as much as possible, and gather all fungal bodies observed. I hope to get a more complete understand-ing of mushrooms, at least from this one small spot in the world.

To go along with this, and since I am legit now, I have been posting regular updates of the progress of this survey on the Mushroom Observer web site. You can help out, and keep up with the progress with the Species in Los Trancos Preserve list on the site.

This list will get updated about every two weeks, with the new species observed, and samples of the photos taken. This can give you an idea of what is out there in the mixed hardwood forests of the Bay Area, and also you can help out. Each species identification can be commented upon; I have already gotten comments from people, and this has helped in providing a more accurate list of species observed.

Hopefully by April I will have a more complete understanding of mushrooms after doing this. But I am not counting on it, in fact I will probably end up understanding less.