Discover the wonderful world of the wild mushroom

ANOTHER LIFE:THE BIG OLD willow across the stream is waiting for a decent breeze. Its hundreds of spring catkins have swelled into fluffy candles and soon a silken blizzard will start drifting past our windows, an uninvited windfall of willows rooting into any moist crevice. The tree, meanwhile, is a takeaway for siskins, tweezering seeds from its cotton-wool cocoons.

And the corncrakes have landed – five males, at least, tuning up in little meadows behind the shore between here and Louisburgh; another was videoed, remarkably, pecking around fishboxes in Cleggan across the bay in Connemara. Last year, the national count was 138: this summer could do even better (Tim Gordon, the BirdWatch corncrake man in Connacht, is at 095-44941).

At such a time it seems perverse to leap ahead to autumn, but a book has appeared out of season whose quality can’t be ignored. Besides, the crucial discernments involved in hunting some choice wild food take time to digest, as it were.

Forest Fungi in Ireland by Paul Dowding and Louis Smith is published by Coford, the National Council for Forest Research and Development, “to help to promote safely an underused national resource”. The book is robustly ring-bound, and at €30 (go to www.coford.ie) quite the best manual for Irish woodland mushroom-hunting we are likely to see.

Dowding and Smith are enthusiastic gatherers who have eaten all 43 edible mushroom species growing in Ireland. Like Coford itself, they want to see more of them harvested for restaurants and home dinner-tables. Our settlers from eastern Europe are amazed at the Irish ignorance, indifference or nervousness that restricts mushroom choices to supermarket packets when, from September to November especially, such free delicacies await in the woods and fields.

The first rule of safety, however, is definite identification. This can be a tricky affair, going beyond close scrutiny of stipes, gills and cap colours to savouring the sometimes subtle scents of mushrooms, and even to making overnight spore prints at home. The idea that poisonous mushrooms don’t peel or will blacken spoons is folk myth. As the authors repeat: “There are old mushroom hunters and there are bold mushroom hunters, but there are no old, bold mushroom hunters.”

Along with the safe and tasty edibles, the book gives detailed attention to 14 species that should be avoided, either because they can cause gastric upsets or because they are too similar in appearance to poisonous species to take a chance. It aso describes, with good photographs, the 13 poisonous mushrooms found in Ireland that should never be eaten.

These include the notorious Amanitas, the Death Cap, Panther Cap and Destroying Angel, for whose ultimately fatal toxins there is no proven antidote. As for adolescent curiosity about mushroom hallucinogens, clear warning comes from two recent deaths in Ireland after eating the nondescript Liberty Caps that grow in pasture.

Our alternating rainy periods and sunny warm spells should be outstanding for wild mushrooms, and the authors quote the summer of 2007, when autumn-fruiting mushrooms started to appear in July, with “large flushes” of the delicious, yellow, apricot-scented chanterelle, or girolle (in my drawing). It grows with birch, oak, Scots pine and beech trees, mainly on acid soils.

With so little surviving native woodland, however, Ireland’s potential biodiversity of fungi can only be guessed at. Almost half of the edible species offered in the book can be found in conifer forests – some, indeed, are closely, biologically paired with particular trees, such as the pine bolete, known as Slippery Jack, or the pine saffron milk cap, Lactarius deliciosus.

A national survey of mushrooms in plantation woodlands began in 2007, but the richest range of fungi certainly belongs to our last shreds of ancient broadleaf woodland, where standing and fallen dead trees add bracket fungi to those emerging from the forest floor. One is the edible Jelly Ears, intensively farmed in Asia. Another is the branching oyster mushroom, growing in clusters weighing up to 2kg and found as early as July in the book’s calendar of fungal fruiting.

Along with student-level text on fungal biology, it also lists the associations between a fungus and particular trees, often as an underground mycorrhizal network entwined with the tree roots and helping to nourish them – key clues in mushroom-hunting. The Irish truffle – yes! – has such a symbiosis with beech on alkaline soils.

There are photographs of “fresh summer truffles” emerging from the ground in Co Longford: lumps the size of conkers, covered in a tough, warty black skin and needing a good scrub with a stiff brush. Our species, Tuber aestivum, is a bit different from the prized French black winter truffle or the Italian white truffle. But, say the authors, “When it is fully ripe, in September and October, it has a good, strong aroma of earthy, musty mushrooms and celeriac.”

Eye on nature

Near Roundwood Reservoir in Wicklow we came on about 30 tiny, long-nosed creatures jumping, darting here and there and emitting high-pitched squeaks in the undergrowth.

Fiona Coffey, Newtownmountkennedy, Co Wicklow

A remarkable gathering of pygmy shrews. Normally solitary, there must have been six or more families of young there

On the shore at Carrickfergus, I came across a small ray upside down on the sand. I managed to get it into shallow water where it revived. There was a lot of wave action and the water was too shallow to allow it to swim submerged but how it fought. Its spiny tail rose like a scorpion. Eventually it got away.

Mike Young, Carrigfergus, Co Antrim

A lapwing has been flying around a newly-planted field nearby, bobbing and diving. It seems to be alone.

Tony Tobin, Nobber, Co Meath

The lapwing may have lost its mate and nest when the field was planted, or may be defending a nest from intrusion

Two letters from Co Sligo report unwavering cricket-like sounds coming from the undergrowth. They were made by a bird, a summer visitor, the grasshopper warbler, which seems plentiful this year.

Michael Viney welcomes observations at Thallabawn, Carrowniskey PO, Westport, Co Mayo. E-mail: viney@anu.ie. Include a postal address.