Mycology

Mycology is the study of fungi, and the amateur version of it is a field science: you go out, you find things, you work out what they are, and you write down what you found and where. The organism you find is a fruiting body — the visible, temporary, reproductive part of something whose actual body is a network of threads running through soil or wood, often for years and sometimes for centuries. What you are collecting is closer to an apple than to a tree.

That single fact explains most of the hobby's shape. Fruiting is seasonal, weather-triggered and unreliable, which is why mycologists talk about years the way gardeners talk about summers. It also explains why picking a fruiting body is not, in itself, damaging in the way picking a rare flower is — the organism is still there — and why habitat destruction is the thing that actually kills fungal populations.

The hobby splits into three activities that most people do all of. Finding is walking slowly in the right places at the right time of year. Identifying is the discipline, and it is genuinely hard. Recording is what makes the first two count for something beyond the day.

What you actually find

The fruiting body, not the organism

Peak season in Britain

Late August to November

The one purchase

A 10× hand lens

What this page will not tell you

Whether anything is safe to eatDeliberately, and permanently. See the safety section.

The first season is about learning to see: gill attachment, substrate, the habit of digging rather than snapping, the discipline of writing down smell before it fades. Most beginners spend it feeling that everything is a brown mushroom, which is an accurate perception rather than a failure.

The second stage is choosing a group and going narrow. Almost everybody who becomes good at this became good at one family first — the boletes, the waxcaps, the rusts, the ascomycetes — because a genus you know well teaches you what a character is worth in a way that breadth never does. It is also the point at which a microscope starts to pay for itself.

Beyond that the routes are recording seriously for a scheme, taking on a county or group recordership, or specialising far enough that you are the person other people send specimens to. Waxcap grassland surveying is a common route into conservation work proper, because the group is a recognised indicator of unimproved grassland and the survey methods are within amateur reach.

1. 1

   Step 1: Buy a hand lens and one field guide, and nothing else yet

   A 10× lens on a cord round your neck, and a guide with keys rather than only photographs. Resist buying a second guide, a basket, a knife roll and a microscope in the first month — the lens is the item that changes what you can see, and everything else can wait until you know which groups interest you.

   You will know it worked when: You can see gill attachment and surface texture, which is where identification starts.

2. 2

   Step 2: Go out with a local fungus group before you go out alone

   This is the single highest-value thing in the hobby and it is usually £10–£25 for a year of it. Identification is learned by watching somebody handle a specimen and say what they are looking at and why. A book cannot do that, and six months alone with a book will teach you less than three forays.

   You will know it worked when: You have watched somebody key out a specimen and heard the reasoning aloud.

3. 3

   Step 3: Learn to take a spore print

   Cap on paper, covered, overnight. The colour of the deposit is one of the most reliable characters there is, it costs nothing, and it is the point at which a beginner stops guessing from photographs. Use half white and half dark paper so a white print is visible.

   You will know it worked when: You have a print, and a colour you can put in a record.

4. 4

   Step 4: Photograph properly, in the field, before you pick

   Cap from above, gills from below, the whole stem including the base — which means excavating rather than snapping, because the base often carries the diagnostic feature — and a shot showing what it was growing on. Substrate is a character, not background.

   You will know it worked when: You have the four images an identifier will ask you for.

5. 5

   Step 5: Write the record before you leave the site

   Date, grid reference or a pin on a phone map, habitat, what it was growing on, and what else was nearby. Every one of these is harder to reconstruct at home than you expect, and a record without a location is a photograph.

   You will know it worked when: You have a record that somebody else could use.

6. 6

   Step 6: Submit it

   Through your local group, a recording scheme, or a national database. This is the step most people skip and the one that turns the hobby into a contribution.

   You will know it worked when: Your Sunday is now data.

• A 10× hand lens — The one indispensable object. Gill attachment, the texture of a cap surface, the presence of fine hairs on a stem — all of it is invisible at arm's length and obvious at 10×. Higher magnification is harder to hold steady and narrows the field until you cannot find what you are looking at; 10× is the standard for a reason. Buy a glass one on a cord.
• A basket, and waxed paper bags — Not a plastic bag, and this is a practical point rather than an aesthetic one: fungi are mostly water, and in plastic they sweat, collapse and go slimy within an hour, taking the surface characters with them. A basket lets air through and stops specimens crushing each other; separate bags stop a strong-smelling species scenting everything else in the basket, which sounds fussy until it happens.
• A knife, and something to dig with — The base of the stem is where several genera hide their diagnostic feature — a bulb, a volva, a distinctive rooting shape — and snapping a specimen off at ground level throws that away. The point of the knife is to lift the whole thing out intact, not to cut it off.
• Two field guides that disagree — One guide gives you an answer; two give you the shape of the uncertainty, which is more useful and more honest. Choose ones with dichotomous keys rather than photograph galleries — matching a picture is how beginners reach confident wrong answers, because the picture is of one specimen in one condition and yours is not it.
• A notebook, used in the field — Smell, texture, whether the flesh changed colour when cut, what it was growing on and how it was attached. Every one of these changes or vanishes on the way home, and the fact that they change is itself sometimes the character.
• A microscope, eventually and not yet — For a great many groups, identification below genus is a microscopic question — spore dimensions, spore ornamentation, cell structures at the gill edge — and no amount of field experience substitutes. A second-hand compound scope with a 100× oil-immersion objective is the threshold. It is the purchase that turns "probably" into a determination, and it is also the purchase that is pointless until you have met the limits of the lens.

The hazards that are actually worth managing on a foray:

• Nothing goes in a mouth — Not a taste, not a nibble, not a lick of a cut surface. Some keys do use taste as a character; that is a technique used by people who already know which genus they are in, and it is not a beginner's tool. Treat it as off-limits and you lose nothing you can currently use.
• Wash your hands before eating your sandwiches — The mundane one, and the one people actually get caught by. You have been handling soil, decaying wood and animal droppings all morning.
• Keep specimens away from food — Separate bag, separate box, and label anything that goes in a fridge. A collecting basket in a kitchen is how an identification exercise becomes an accident involving somebody who was not on the walk.
• The wood itself — Most foray injuries are the ordinary ones — ticks, trips on root and slope, getting cold standing still, and losing track of daylight in October because you were looking at the ground. Ticks in particular are worth a check afterwards.
• Ask before you assume access — Being somewhere lawfully and being allowed to take something from it are different questions, and the second is covered below.

Identification is not pattern-matching against remembered images, although that is what it looks like when an experienced person does it quickly. It is the systematic elimination of possibilities using characters, and the reason it is hard is that the useful characters are mostly not the ones a beginner notices first. Colour is unreliable — it changes with age, weather and light. Size is unreliable for the same reasons. Shape is a starting point and rarely a conclusion.

The characters that carry weight are structural and contextual. Spore print colour is close to a first-order division and costs only an overnight wait. How the gills meet the stem — free, adnate, decurrent — is a character you can see with a lens and is stable. What it was growing on and with is not background information: many species are specific to a tree genus, and "on birch" or "on a buried conifer cone" can eliminate most of a page. Smell is genuinely diagnostic in several groups and is difficult to convey in writing, which is one of the reasons the hobby is learned in company. What happens when you cut it — bruising, colour change, latex — is a character that only exists if you look within the first minute.

Then there is the honest part, which is that a large proportion of specimens cannot be named from the field at all, and that experienced mycologists record a great many things to genus and stop. Learning to write down "*Russula* sp." rather than guessing at a species is a skill, not a failure, and a record that is right at genus is worth more than one that is wrong at species.

The British Mycological Society publishes a recommended code of conduct for responsible collecting, and local groups generally work to it. The conventions that matter most are restraint and record-keeping: take what you need to identify and no more, leave small and immature specimens where they are because they are the ones that cannot be identified anyway, and do not strip a patch that somebody else is about to walk past.

Mycology is unusual among hobbies in that the ordinary output of an ordinary amateur afternoon is scientifically useful. The British Mycological Society describes biological records as "an essential resource for understanding and mapping the UK's fungal diversity", and is explicit that records submitted by individuals and groups affiliated to it — "the majority of whom are volunteers" — are used to inform conservation priorities and policies. The Fungal Records Database of Britain and Ireland holds over 2.5 million records covering four centuries of recording.

That is the reason to write things down properly, and it changes what a good day looks like. A day that produces six carefully recorded common species is a better day, by this measure, than one that produces a photograph of something spectacular and unidentified. Distribution data is built from the unremarkable.

The social structure of the hobby follows from the difficulty of identification. Local fungus groups run forays through the autumn, usually with somebody experienced doing determinations at a table at the end; regional recorders collate; national schemes aggregate. It is an apprenticeship culture, it is generally welcoming to beginners because beginners are how it continues, and it has a strong norm against confident assertion — the standard register among good mycologists is markedly more tentative than among good birders, because the subject punishes confidence more often.

• Identification and recording — Learning what things are and submitting records to the national recording schemes. The core of British amateur mycology, the branch the societies are organised around, and the one that produces genuinely useful science from a hobby.
• Foraging — Collecting to eat. The position this site takes on that is set out in the safety section, and it is neither repeated nor softened here. Foraging is named as a branch because pretending it is not one would help nobody — and what it rests on is identification, which is a skill with its own timeline and its own teachers.
• Cultivation — Growing fungi deliberately, on logs, straw or grain, from bought spawn. Almost entirely separate from field mycology in skill and equipment, indoors, year-round, and with none of the identification risk — which makes it the branch most worth suggesting to somebody impatient.
• Microscopy — Spore measurement, staining and sectioning, which is where identification of a large proportion of species actually happens. The step that separates casual identification from reliable identification, and it is a hobby in itself.
• Photography and illustration — Documenting fungi well, which is harder than it looks and is what makes a record verifiable. A branch that pairs naturally with the recording schemes.
• Dyeing with fungi — Extracting colour rather than eating it, with a small and enthusiastic literature. Shares equipment and discipline with natural dyeing, which has its own page here.
• Lichenology and slime moulds — Neighbouring groups that field mycologists meet constantly and that have their own societies and their own recording schemes. Included because a beginner will encounter both and will not know they are elsewhere.