It’s easy to see how this cup fungi gets the common name Eyelash Cup when you get a closeup look at these tiny mushrooms. Dark hairs on the cup’s edge look like eyelashes. Their habit of growing in groups and orange color makes them stand out.

Scutellinia scutellata

A macro view revels the hairs that look like eyelashes. Eyelash cups seem to like cooler temperatures, I find them regularly in the spring and fall.

The trees have dropped most of their leaves and hunting mushrooms has gotten a lot harder. Anything on the forest floor is now pretty much buried and even if a mushroom is ‘visible’ they’re well camouflaged by the colors of the fallen leaves.

Brushing away the leaves revels some mushrooms growing under the litter.

I haven’t tried too hard to identify these. It just gets too frustrating. If you have a clue I’m willing to listen.

Another but not as well hidden group of mushrooms.

Again the identity is anybody’s guess, I’m not going to bang my head trying to name them.

I figured it wasn’t a bad day at all. I actually knew half of the mushrooms I found. The Pear Shaped Puffball photo didn’t come out well enough to use so you won’t see it here.

The common name Fly Agaric comes from Europe where pieces of the red variety Amanita muscaria var. muscaria was soaked in milk and used to kill or stupefy flies. It looks like there are a number of similar/same forms ranging from red to orange / yellow to white (A. muscaria var. alba) so being absolutely sure of an identification is questionable since there can be quite a difference among the same species.

Amanita muscaria

– var. guessowii or formosa (depending on who you talk to I guess)

The red forms (muscaria) are known to be hallucinogenic and poisonous. The exact makeup and amounts seem to vary with the location they grow. It appears the farther north they grow the more they’re likely to be hallucinogenic. It’s interesting to note that the Viking ate muscaria before battle to ward off fear. No wonder they were called Berserkers. In Siberia the shamans ate the mushrooms in order to talk to God.

The yellow sub-species don’t seem to have the hallucinogenic effects of the northern variety and the effects are best described as one of delirium and deep sleep, sometimes with profuse sweating.

Now for something you really don’t want to think about:
These mushrooms contain toxins that make a person violently ill. The toxin is metabolized while the hallucinogens are passed through the body unchanged. It’s a piss poor reason but some people drink the urine of people or animals who had eaten the mushrooms in order to get high without suffering the toxic effects.

Fly Agarics are fairly large mushrooms. They can grow to the size of a dinner plate. This one was a little more than a handful.

They are often associated with conifers and this one was growing at the base of a White Pine.

…and if I offer you a gold colored drink you can be sure it’s only a beer. I don’t want anyone to go berserk on me.

This is a cool mushroom. Velvet Foot is also known as the Winter Mushroom since it grows during warm spells when Old Man Winter takes a break. I found these while daytime temperatures were in the mid 60s and nights dropped into the low 40s and upper 30s. I don’t know how much lower they would take but a good guess would be they won’t tolerate getting frozen at night.

Flammulina velutipes

As one would guess, Velvet Foot Mushrooms get their name from the stems which are dark and velvety starting at the base.

This is a good example why some mushrooms are so hard to identify. Field Guides don’t have pics of all stages of growth. Early growth sometimes has no resemblance to later stages.

Other clues besides the velvety stems help to identify it. Slimy looking sticky caps, growing on dead Elm trees and old stems almost entirely blackish colored with the velvet look and feel.

Edible:
This is supposed to be excellent eating but I wouldn’t know. I’m called a lot of thing but fungus eater isn’t one of them.

Flammulina velutipes is cultivated and known as the Enoki mushroom or Enokitake. When cultivated it looks nothing like the wild mushrooms. If you see them in stores they will be white with long stems and tiny caps. Enoki is cultivated in darkness which causes them grow long and thin as they seek light. Similar growth can be seen in the wild where it grows under loose bark. The hidden mushrooms will look like the cultivated ones and where they ‘escape’ from the dark will have normal growth.

In 1993 Flammulina velutipes was cultivated on the Space Shuttle Columbia to see what the effects of weightlessness had on their growth. They normally grow straight up with caps basically parallel to the ground, one would assume making it easy for spores to fall to the ground. In space however the mushrooms grew every which way with no orientation due to the lack of gravity.