The Audubon Society field guide to North American mushrooms

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1. ajacksifiedSep 2023
   Hot takes aside, if you're looking for great foraging books, I'd suggest anything by David Arora, such as "All That the Rain Promises and More" and "Mushrooms Demystified". The National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Mushrooms is, of course, pretty good too.

   Outside of identification, "Chanterelle Dreams, Amanita Nightmares" and "Radical Mycology" are good reads too.

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2. bitcuriousJan 2022
   Fun list, but: Do Not Use As Your Guide.

   Here is a mushroom that will kill you, which looks just like a puffball until you cut it in half: https://marksteinmetz.photoshelter.com/image/I0000IoVqJv8YbG...

   If you're interested in foraging mushrooms, which is super fun and [ful]filling, I recommend seeking out your local Mycological Society and joining them for some guided walks. These will help you learn what to pay attention to when identifying mushrooms. They also typically host Foraging 101 classes, which are similar to the article but with a greater focus on deadly lookalikes and safety, and maybe some recipes! They also often have annual mushroom feasts where you can eat some fun and unusual stuff.

   As a general practice, for the first year of your foraging (and maybe a for a while after) have a more experienced forager/expert validate your IDs. A good resource is also the mushroom identification Reddit.

   Finally, get a book! I have maybe a dozen, but by far my most used is the The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Mushrooms by Gary Lincoff. Excellent for identifying mushrooms you're likely to run into, although the scientific names aren't super accurate.

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3. thisisauseridAug 2024
   To be fair, even the National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Mushrooms tells you that if you follow it without knowing what you're doing your going to get poisoned.

   Not necessarily an AI issue.

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4. samstaveDec 2023
   Wonderful, thank you. I have here in front of me "The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Mushrooms" I think Ill read up a bit in there to see what I can find out.

   (heh saw you in another thread, mr 4/4 (that Kuni Kath architecture vid was interesting)

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   Paul Stamets is a national treasure - I just wish he would release what he knows about Portobellos that he claims they will kill him if he releases it.

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5. samstaveSep 2021
   Im literally sitting here with "THE AUDUBON SOCIETY FIELD GUIDE TO NORTH AMERICAN MUSHROOMS" - And I am still terrified and amazed with them.
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6. YeGoblynQueenneOct 2019
   >> The point here is: NEVER follow any generic rules (like avoid mushrooms with this or that feature), but reliably identify the type you want to eat!

   There's a famous machine learning dataset (cited by at least 50 papers) where the task is to identify mushrooms as "definitely poisonous", "edible" or "not recommended (for eating)":

   https://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/datasets/mushroom

   The following passage I quote from the UCI repository's mirror of the data agrees with your rule:

   This data set includes descriptions of hypothetical samples corresponding to 23 species of gilled mushrooms in the Agaricus and Lepiota Family (pp. 500-525). Each species is identified as definitely edible, definitely poisonous, or of unknown edibility and not recommended. This latter class was combined with the poisonous one. The [Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Mushrooms] clearly states that there is no simple rule for determining the edibility of a mushroom; no rule like ``leaflets three, let it be'' for Poisonous Oak and Ivy.

   So that's just the mushrooms in two families, and there's no definite rule to identify them as poisonous or not. To be honest, I think I'll make up a rule on the spot: "if it's growing wild, I won't eat it" :0

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