Advice

 

My advice on observing and identifying fungi (if you want it)

Updated 22 November 2020

Getting started in mycology — the study of fungi — is hard. There's no getting away from that. But it can be an incredibly rewarding hobby once you get going. So I thought I'd share a few tips from me on how to get started. 

I'm not an expert mycologist. I'm simply an enthusiastic amateur. These tips are based on five years of just having a go.

My interest is in observing and identifying fungi for recording purposes. I don't have any experience of foraging and edibility of fungi is not something I really know about. Whatever your interest in fungi, be aware some species of fungi are poisonous if ingested.

Remember 'fungi' is an entire kingdom

People don't generally set themselves the goal of learning to identify 'animals' — it's more usual to tackle a subset of the animal kingdom: birds, small mammals, butterflies, or whatever. But for some reason, with fungi, many people (myself included) start off wanting to have a crack at the whole lot. That's probably too big a goal for one lifetime.

Get outside and look at fungi

The more you look, the more you'll see. Just seeing the incredible diversity of fungi in the woods, parks and fields around you can be a great way to get inspired. This is a nice book to take out with you, if you're just getting started: 'Collins Complete Guide to British Mushrooms & Toadstools' by Sterry & Hughes (2009)...

... but don't believe any book when it tells you it's 'complete'. There are WAY too many species of fungi in Britain to fit into one book. 

Another book which I've found to be helpful in getting started in field mycology is 'Mushrooms' by Roger Phillips (2006) which is just about small enough to comfortably fit in a rucksack. 'Fungi' by Andy Overall (2017), a photographic guide showing species in their natural settings, can also serve as a useful reference when you get home (it's a bit too big to fit in a rucksack).

Some people prefer illustrated identification guides. The 'Collins Fungi Guide' by Buczacki et al (2013) is useful as a list of fungi you might encounter in Britain; but I don't find the descriptions and illustrations are generally detailed enough to aid confident identification — so it's not a book I'd particularly recommend. I'd say the best modern illustrated guide to fungi in Britain would be the volumes published by Geoffrey Kibby (see below). Or else many people still swear by the old classics such as 'Mushrooms & Toadstools Of Britain And Europe' by Courtecuisse (1995) and 'The Mushrooms and Toadstools of Britain and North-western Europe' by Bon (1987) — out of print but you may be able to find them second hand.

It's worth being aware that fungi are very cosmopolitan: 'new' species are turning up in Britain all the time, from various corners of the world. And as our climate changes, species which once found these isles inhospitable could start to make themselves at home. That's one reason why many books cover Britain & Europe, not just Britain.

You're going to find things that you can't match up with the information in this book, or whatever book you've got. That's to be expected. It's likely you'll also find yourself investigating colourful berries, old crisp packets, abandoned dog toys etc, before you realise what they are. I think that's normal.

Try not to get discouraged if you can't put a name to something. Just keep looking and learning.

Learn to recognise groups of fungi

Learning how to recognise what group of fungi a particular specimen belongs to is a vital step towards understanding what you're looking at.

The identification wheels in 'Fungi of Temperate Europe' by Thomas Læssøe & Jens H. Petersen (2019) provide a wonderful visual overview of all the various form groups and are an extremely useful tool when it come to navigating your way around 'kingdom fungi'.

The authors have made the wheels freely available to download from www.mycokey.com — for personal and educational use. Would highly recommend printing off and using these.

If you feel like you're developing a serious interest in fungus identification, then I'd also recommend buying 'Fungi of Temperate Europe' as it's a stunning book and packed with information. But it's a seriously weighty body of work that comes in two, thick, A4-sized volumes. So, while I think it's great value at around £100, it's not a field guide or a 'just getting started' sort of book. 

Learn how to observe fungal 'characters' / features

Most species of fungi can't be identified by just looking down at them. 

If you just want to get a look at a fungus, without disturbing it, a little pocket mirror can help with seeing underneath...

... but for the purposes of identifying and recording fungi it is often necessary to collect specimens, so that one can fully observe their features and compare with reference literature. (I say a bit more about collecting in the section at the end.)

Across the various groups of fungi, taxonomists have identified particular features, or 'characters', which are critical to identification. The key characters will be different, depending what type of fungus you're looking at. For example, if you're interested in gilled mushrooms, it's important to look at the whole thing: the cap, the gills, the stem (or 'stipe') and the base of the stipe. You might also need to check if it has a particular smell, if it releases milk (or 'latex') when the gills are broken, or if it has a particular feel to it, e.g. if it feels dry, greasy or slimy.

Fungi can show an amazingly diverse array of characters. Depending on what group you're studying, you could find yourself poking them, sniffing them, tasting them (with caution!) or even listening to them, to ascertain the presence of critical identification features. You'll likely need to observe a combination of different characters to arrive at an identification.  

When studying mushrooms, the colour of the mature spores is an important feature in guiding identification; this can be observed by making a spore print. If you place your specimen onto a glass microscope slide to get a spore print, then you can scrape the spores into a little heap and view it against different backgrounds (i.e. black or white; or a spore colour chart like this one) to better observe the colour.

Viewing the spores of Lactarius azonites against the spore colour chart in 'Mushrooms and Toadstools of Britain & Ireland, Volume 1' by Geoffrey Kibby (2017)

The First Nature website, run by Pat O'Reilly & Sue Parker, is a great resource for information on fungi and their identification features and Pat O'Reilly's book 'Fascinated by Fungi' provides a friendly and comprehensive introduction to the subject. 

If it's mushrooms you're particularly interested, then I thought 'Mushrooms' by Peter Marren (2012, reprinted in 2019) was a good read — worth putting on the Christmas list. It contains some helpful potted descriptions of the main groups of mushrooms.

Learn about how different fungal species associate with plants

Fungi have long existed in a kind of evolutionary tango with plants. Some fungi live in plants, on plants, or in association with plants — through mycorrhizal networks. 

The recently published book 'Entangled Life' by Merlin Sheldrake (2020) provides fascinating insights into how fungi live. This kind of understanding can really help with interpreting what you're seeing, when you see fungi out in the field.

As some fungal species grow only in association with certain species of plant, an ability to identify trees and shrubs comes in very handy for the budding field mycologist.

Get out in the field with an experienced mycologist

In my experience, there is no substitute for having someone talk you through the identification features of fungal features in the field.  

In normal times, connecting with a local recording group can provide opportunities to get out in the field with local mycologists. You can find a list of groups on the British Mycological Society website: https://www.britmycolsoc.org.uk/mycology/recording-network/groups

Local conservation organisations may also offer fungus identification courses and guided fungi walks.

This is obviously trickier during Covid-times, but there are some great resources going up online, e.g. 

• Virtual foray with the FUNgi guy, on youtube: https://youtu.be/UHX5Ma84ZJs
• Virtual foray at Harcourt Arboretum with Richard Fortey: https://youtu.be/MH1K1I7iQac
  
• 'Lundy fungi', a virtual foray: https://youtu.be/p7IKXdVBQNs
  

Connect with other people interested in fungi

As I said at the beginning, mycology is hard! And it doesn't stop being hard. Connecting with other people who share an interest in fungi provides opportunities for learning more about fungus identification, and celebrating tiny triumphs, when you find something 'good'.

As well as the local recording groups I mentioned above, there's an active community of mycologists in the British Mycological Society group on Facebook.

There are also a bunch of mycologists on Twitter, I started making a list here. 

Focus!

In my experience, trying to identify every fungus you come across quickly becomes very time consuming and often rather discouraging. One solution to this is to focus. There are various ways to approach this.

Focus on a patch

Choosing a local patch where you'll focus your efforts on finding and identifying fungi can be very rewarding, as you gradually start to recognise the fungi popping up around you on your walks and know when you've spotted something different.

Focus on a group of species

Because there are too many fungal species to fit into just one book, the mycological literature abounds with 'monographs' covering specific groups of fungi. If there's a particular group of fungi that interests you, then purchasing a relevant book will help you understand their diversity and key identification features in more depth.

These are just a couple of examples that I find myself using a lot.

Focus on a particular habitat

People often think of fungi as occurring primarily in woodland. But fungi occur pretty much everywhere. Different habitats are home to different assemblages of fungal species.

The 'Collins Complete Guide to British Mushrooms and Toadstools' by Sterry & Hughes (2009) which I mentioned at the top has some useful pages at the back showing species you may come across in different habitats.

You might also want to invest in literature focussed on fungi found in a particular habitat. For example, 'Grassland Fungi: a field guide' by Wood & Dunkelman (2nd edition, 2020) is one I use a lot.

Consider taking the leap into using a microscope for fungus identification

If you find yourself getting seriously interested in fungus identification then getting a microscope, and knowing how to use it to to examine microscopic features of fungi, opens up whole new vistas — and can be very exciting once you gain confidence in identifying more rarely recorded species.

I put together an online presentation on 'using a microscope for fungus identification' which you can find here: https://misidentifyingfungi.blogspot.com/2019/10/using-microscope-for-fungus.html 

I have found the volumes published by Geoffrey Kibby on 'Mushrooms and Toadstools of Britain and Europe' (2017) to be a great resource when learning how to identify fungi using a microscope, as the key microscopic features are shown alongside the illustrations of each species. In my view these books are an excellent bridge between the 'field guides' (which aren't always comprehensive enough to support confident identification to species) and the genus-specific 'monographs' (which can be rather overwhelming, for the novice).

Record your observations

Recording your observations can be daunting, when you're not sure what you're looking at and you don't know if your identifications are correct.

I started this blog so that I could keep a record of my own observations, without necessarily having to commit a 'record' to someone else's database — and without having to worry about getting things wrong. 

There are many different ways you can keep a record of your observations. It might be a notebook, an organised photo album, a sketchbook or a database. However you do it, the process of doing it will help you learn and remember what you've seen.

The historic mycological literature includes some wonderful and inspiring examples of observations being recorded. See, for example:

You can find 'Fungi collected in Shropshire and other neighbourhoods' in the @BioDivLibrary https://t.co/slcEnPq7ch - it's a beauty. #MycoBookClub https://t.co/mZ9tcj1X6u

— The Mycological Book Club (@MycoBookClub) November 3, 2020

 

Nowadays there are various tools online that you could use to help you do this. For example, both iSpot (developed by the Open University) and iNaturalist (developed by the California Academy of Sciences) enable you to record 'observations' without necessarily knowing what you're looking at. There are communities of people who use these websites — so you may find they offer suggestions on identifying the species you've observed. (Although that's not to say their suggestions will necessarily be correct!)

Once you've gained some confidence in identifying fungi, you may wish to share your observations as 'species records'. Again, there are various options for doing this. iRecord (developed by the Biological Records Centre in the UK) is a good system for sharing records of UK flora, fauna and funga. Alternatively, the British Mycological Society runs a specialist online database for recording fungus observations: The Fungal Records Database of Britain and Ireland — which is designed to capture all the various bits of information that are particularly relevant to fungus recording, such as what it's growing on (the 'substrate') and associated organisms (e.g. if you are recording an observation of a mycorrhizal species). These systems include the option to mark a record as 'sensitive', which blurs the location information accessible to the public, if you're concerned about a particular fungus or site you've recorded being vulnerable to human disturbance.

I gave a presentation on 'fungus records: how are they used?' to the British Mycological Society which you can see here: https://misidentifyingfungi.blogspot.com/2018/06/fungus-records-how-are-they-used.html

Embrace the science

Fungus identification isn't just about putting a name to something.

Names — 'species concepts' — are a kind of shorthand for understanding a species' physical characters ('morphology'), how it lives ('ecology') and how it evolved ('phylogeny'). Science is constantly changing and advancing our understanding of species. As a consequence of this, names change. This can be frustrating to the amateur mycologist, "just when I've learnt the old name!" — but I think we do a disservice to the scientists and taxonomists who are labouring to improve our understanding of fungi if we let ourselves get annoyed by it. In the field of mycology taxonomists are few and their work is dauntingly vast. 

To my mind, it really doesn't matter if you're using an 'old name', as long as you're clear on what you mean by it. Old names aren't 'wrong' — they continue to have meaning. And modern search engines make it a matter of moments to check what name people are currently preferring, and on whose authority the name has been put forward, if you want to be up-to-date with the latest species concepts.

There is so much we still don't know about fungi. Amateur mycologists are getting involved in DNA sequencing now, helping to inform understanding of fungal species diversity. Your observations — carefully recorded — can help to contribute to the advancement of fungal science. To me, that's one of the things that makes mycology so exciting.

Have fun!

That's it really. However far you feel like getting into the field of mycology, have fun with it.

Oh... and be responsible

You can find the British Mycological Society's 'Code of Conduct for Responsible Collecting of Fungi for Research and Educational Purposes' here. 

As the Code says, "It is often necessary to collect for identification purposes. The identification and study of fungi is important to further our knowledge of them and to ensure their future survival." — and the Code offers guidance on how to do this responsibly. Do read it!

There are various resources online that you may find useful in informing your own judgements about where and what to collect:

Designated sites  

Information on designated sites in Great Britain can be accessed via MAGIC. Consideration should be given to obtaining necessary consents as well as landowner permissions, if you are wishing to collect on land which is protected / designated for its nature conservation interest.

Protected and designated species

Information on the conservation status of fungi can be accessed via the Fungi of Great Britain & Ireland website, here. 

Species which are listed under Schedule 8 of the Wildlife & Countryside Act 1981 are legally protected from intentional picking, uprooting or destruction. As of November 2020, there are four species of fungi listed under Schedule 8: Hericium erinaceus, Battarrea phalloides, Buglossoporus quercinus, and Butyriboletus regius; but you're very unlikely to come across B. regius in Britain as Kibby (2017) reports that it's "very rare, reported in error from a single location in southern England; probably not yet British".

Bearded Tooth Hericium erinaceus: a Schedule 8 species.

Fungi and the Drugs Act 2005

Any fungus containing psilocybin/psilocin is also a 'controlled drug' under the provisions of the Drugs Act 2005.

Appendix 12 of this document — British Mycological Society guidance notes on 'Collecting and Recording Fungi' by Richard Iliffe (updated 2006) — contains guidelines for field mycologists on 'the practical interpretation of Section 21 of the Drugs Act 2005'.

 

If all this sounds a little daunting, I would thoroughly recommend joining in with fungus recording visits organised by a local fungus recording group — as they should have all this stuff covered.