Fun with fungi: Western Pennsylvania Mushroom Club plans North Park foray

When it comes to identifying mushrooms, some folks get about as far as distinguishing between the little ones you slice to put on pizza and the big ones that fit nicely inside of a burger bun.

Then there are the mycologists within the Western Pennsylvania Mushroom Club.

“In general, a mycologist is someone who has studied mycology, which is fungus,” member Cecily Franklin of O’Hara said. “In our club, a mycologist is somebody who can identify at least 500 different mushrooms.”

And that’s kind of scratching the surface.

From the tasty chanterelle and chicken of the woods to the toxic and appropriately named death cap, about 11,000 named species grow in North America, according to the Journal of Wild Mushrooming.

Foraging for them evidently is a popular pursuit. The Western Pennsylvania Mushroom Club, of which Franklin is a past president, has more than 900 members.

They’re looking forward to the 22nd annual Gary Lincoff Foray, scheduled for Sept. 24 at The Lodge in North Park. The event features guest speakers, guided walks, an auction, sales tables and vendors, and new this year, live music and a mushroom cultivation activity table.

Also on the schedule is what very well could be the featured attraction.

“We always have a mushroom feast,” Franklin said, “and a lot of our members will prepare food and bring it.”

Her own interest in the fleshy, spore-bearing fungi — don’t let that spoil your appetite! — stems primarily from her residence being surrounded by trees.

“I’ve lived here for 35 years, and for the first bunch of those years, I worked full-time downtown. So I didn’t even pay any attention to my woods,” she said. “But after I left the rat race, I started cleaning things up. I started pulling weeds and pulling vines, and I would find this stuff — big orange stuff, big brown stuff — coming out of trees. And I would just say, what is that?”

She remembers spying something that, according to her husband, resembled a traffic cone in color. When she looked it up online, she found a match in the species Omphalotus olearius, or jack-o’-lantern, a bioluminescent variety.

The possibility of seeing it light up at night piqued her curiosity.

“So I go sitting outside for the next two nights, waiting for my stupid mushroom to glow in the dark, which it never did, because it wasn’t the jack-o’-lantern,” Franklin said. “It was a chicken mushroom.”

Nevertheless, she continued to be intrigued enough to take photographs of what she found, and took the resulting album to her first Western Pennsylvania Mushroom Club meeting in 2009. The members, of course, were happy to help her with identifications, and she has been an integral part of the organization since.

And so she is spreading the word about the event named for after Pittsburgh native Lincoff (1942-2018), who wrote “The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Mushrooms.” The club made him an honorary member, and Franklin had the opportunity to meet him during her first foray.

Speaking of writers, three will give presentations during the event: Arleen and Alan Bessette, with more than 20 mushroom-related books to their credit, and Stephen Russell, founder of the Hoosier Mushroom Society and author of “The Essential Guide to Cultivating Mushrooms.”

The weekend extravaganza actually kicks off Sept. 23 with a pre-foray walk at Cook Forest State Park, northeast of Clarion, with Park Ranger Dale Luthringer. There is no charge for the walk, but participants will be responsible for their own transportation and lunch.

Saturday’s activities start with registration at 7:30 a.m. Following lunch, Arleen Bessette will discuss “Polypore Identification – Where to Begin?” at 1 o’clock, and Russell talks about “The Next Generation of DNA Research” at 2:15. Alan Bessette will speak from 5:30 to 6.

Anyone who has an interest in wild mushrooms is welcome to become a member of the Western Pennsylvania Mushroom Club, which meets the third Tuesday evening of each month from March through November at the Frick Environmental Center in Point Breeze.

For more information about the club, the Gary Lincoff Foray and other events, visit wpamushroomclub.org.

And as any club member would tell you:

Never eat an unidentified mushroom!