Hey, Ma! We're not eating the mushrooms!

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And that's a good thing, because some wild mushroom are inedible or even poisonous!  Recently, severe thunderstorms have brought a lot of rain to our neck of the woods in Wisconsin.  As a result, our daily hikes have been teeming with mushrooms.  We have never seen so many varieties nor so many mushrooms in the forest.  Donna has really enjoyed stopping to snap photos of them.

Did you know that a mushroom is the reproductive structure produced by some fungi? Eeeww!! Is that what I eat?  It can also be described like the fruit of a plant.  Now that sounds better!  Popularly, the term mushroom is used to identify the edible sporophores; the term toadstool is often reserved for inedible or poisonous sporophores.

Our daughter-in-law asked us whether we had seen any red mushrooms with white polka dots like the ones she has seen in the movies.  We said no..... until we saw mushrooms that actually looked like they had white polka dots on them..... well, not exactly polka dots - maybe insect bites.

Rather than run the risk of boring you with the scientific names, some of the common names of the mushrooms we saw are: coral, shelf, oyster, conk, honey, and chanterelle/false chanterelle.  Identifying them can be difficult and can mean the difference between living and dying.  It's no wonder we chose not to pick and eat the mushrooms!

How many mushrooms do you recognize from the photos below?













About nine more days in Wausau, so look for more blog posts soon.  Then we're on the road again!



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