The Grand River Mushroom Club is about ninety people in and around Grand Rapids, Michigan, who would rather be crawling around under an oak tree on a wet Saturday morning than almost anywhere else. We hunt, photograph, identify, study and, carefully, eat the wild mushrooms of west Michigan. Our members include a retired botany professor, a dozen serious cooks, several families with children, two artists and a great many beginners. Beginners are why we exist.

I'm Clifford Lichtenstein. I'm a hospital pharmacist by trade, and I lead forays for the club and keep this page. I've been hunting mushrooms since I was seven, and I'm still learning new ones every fall. That is the first thing to know about mushrooms: nobody knows them all.

Twenty-six of us, nine of them on their first foray, on a cool gray morning after enough rain the week before to wake everything up. It was a hen of the woods day. We found five of them at the bases of old red and white oaks, gray-brown rosettes of overlapping caps the size of a cabbage, and the biggest, found by the youngest member of the club, weighed in at a little over eight pounds on my fish scale. There was chicken of the woods on a fallen oak, sulphur yellow and orange, honey mushrooms in clusters at every other stump, a row of shaggy manes along the gravel road, two giant puffballs at the edge of the old field, and oysters on a dead aspen.

And there were two things nobody ate. Steven Clausen, on his first foray, came out of the oaks holding a tall, pure white, beautiful mushroom with a ring on the stem, and I asked him to set it down very gently on a piece of wax paper and wash his hands. It was a destroying angel, and we dug up the base to show the sac it grows from. Everyone looked. Then it went into its own bag, labeled. Twenty yards away was a cluster of bright orange jack-o'-lanterns at the foot of an oak stump, a mushroom that makes people very sick every fall because they think it's a chanterelle. Everybody looked at that, too, and at the gills, and at the orange inside when I cut one open. That is what a foray is for.

The full species list and the earlier reports are on the Foray Reports page.

Our once-a-year public display, at the Cedar Run Nature Center, noon to 5:00. We will have a hundred or more species of fresh wild mushrooms collected the day before, laid out on paper plates on long tables, sorted and labeled with their common and Latin names and whether they're edible, inedible or poisonous. Bring your own mushrooms from your yard or woods for identification at the "Mystery Table," where our most experienced members will tell you what they are, or that they aren't sure, which is also an answer. There will be spore prints, a children's table, a slide show at 2:00, and a cooking demonstration with cultivated mushrooms from the store. Admission is free. Angel Esqueda, the nature center's naturalist, has been a great friend to the club, and we thank her and the center for the room.

Please note: we will not tell anyone a mushroom from the Mystery Table is safe to eat. We'll tell you what we think it is. What you do with it is your responsibility, and our advice is always the same.

I work in a hospital. I have helped care for a man who ate a destroying angel he was sure was something else. He lived, barely. I will not soften any of this.

1. Never eat a wild mushroom unless an expert has identified it with certainty. Not a book, not a picture, not your neighbor's say-so. An experienced person, in person, looking at the actual mushroom. If there is any doubt at all, throw it out. There are no old, bold mushroom hunters.
2. Try only a small amount of any new edible the first time, and only one new kind at a time. Some people react badly to mushrooms that other people eat with no trouble at all.
3. Always cook wild mushrooms. Several good edibles, honey mushrooms and morels among them, will make you sick raw.
4. Save a specimen. Put one uncooked specimen of whatever you ate in a paper bag in the refrigerator for a couple of days. If someone gets sick, the doctors will need to know exactly what it was.
5. If anyone gets sick after eating a wild mushroom, call your poison control center or go to an emergency room right away. The number is in the front of your phone book. Don't wait to see if it passes. The deadliest mushrooms don't make you sick for many hours, sometimes most of a day, and by then the damage has started. Take the saved specimen with you.
6. There are no tests. Silver spoons, peeling the cap, "the squirrels eat it": all of it is folklore, and all of it has killed people.

How to make a spore print, and how to tell the deadly ones from the ones they look like: Spore Prints and Safety.

My father took me out for my first morels in May of 1960, when I was seven, in the woodlots and old orchards north of town. The elms were dying then, all over Michigan, and a dying elm is the best friend a morel hunter ever had. I remember the light through the bare branches, and my father kneeling, and pointing, and me not seeing it, and not seeing it, and then suddenly seeing it, a little gray honeycomb on a stalk, and then seeing twenty of them all around my feet. Everyone who hunts morels remembers that moment. My father fried them in butter that night, and I have been a mushroom hunter ever since.

This May was a good season around here: the club's spring forays found yellow morels in old apple orchards and under dead elms and ash, and one member found more than four hundred under a single dying elm and wouldn't tell anybody where. That's the morel hunter's code, and I respect it.