This page is for beginners, and it is not a field guide. Nothing on a web page, including this one, is enough to identify a mushroom you mean to eat. What it can do is teach you two habits that will keep you out of the hospital: make a spore print of everything, and learn the handful of deadly mushrooms so well that you could pick them out of a basket in the dark.

A mushroom is the fruit of a fungus, and its job is to drop spores, millions of them, too small to see one at a time. Collected in a pile, though, they have a color, and that color is one of the most useful clues there is.

1. Pick a fresh, mature mushroom, one with the cap fully open.
2. Cut the stem off flush with the cap.
3. Lay the cap, gills or pores down, on a piece of paper that is half white and half black. (Tape two pieces together, or color half a sheet with a black marker.) Light spores show on the black; dark ones on the white. A piece of glass works too, and you can hold it up against either color afterward.
4. Put a drop of water on top of the cap if it's dry, and cover the whole thing with a bowl or a drinking glass, so no breeze disturbs it.
5. Leave it for several hours, or overnight.
6. Lift the cap off gently. The spores will have fallen in a pattern of the gills, like a ghost of the mushroom.

What the colors tell you, for a few common groups:

Write the color on the paper with the date and where you found it, and keep it with the specimen. Bring both to a meeting.

The destroying angel grows here in Michigan every summer and fall, mostly in oak and mixed woods. It is pure white all over and very beautiful. Learn all of these marks together:

• white gills, free from the stem
• a white spore print
• a skirt-like ring on the upper stem (it can fall off)
• a cup or sac, called the volva, around the base of the stem, often buried in the soil, which is why you must always dig up the whole mushroom, never cut it off at ground level

Its poison, which it shares with the death cap of Europe and the deadly galerina, attacks the liver. Cooking does not destroy it. The first symptoms, violent vomiting and diarrhea, don't come for many hours after the meal; then the person may seem to get better for a day or so while the damage goes on. One cap can kill an adult.

What it gets mistaken for: the meadow mushroom (which has pink to brown gills, a chocolate brown spore print and no cup) and the young button of a puffball. That is why every puffball gets cut in half from top to bottom. A true puffball is solid and white inside, like a marshmallow, all the way through. A young amanita "egg" cut the same way shows the outline of a cap, gills and stem inside. Throw it out and wash your hands.

A spring problem, but every morel hunter needs to know it. The false morel has a cap that is wrinkled and folded, reddish brown, more like a brain or a walnut than a honeycomb, and it is not hollow. True morels have a cap of pits and ridges like a sponge.

The test that settles it: slice it in half lengthwise, top to bottom. A true morel is completely hollow, one single open chamber from the tip of the cap to the bottom of the stem, with the cap attached to the stem. A false morel is chambered, or stuffed with cottony white tissue.

False morels contain a poison that turns, in the body, into a compound used in rocket fuel. People have been poisoned and some have died. You will meet old-timers who say they eat them parboiled every spring. Don't listen.

Bright pumpkin orange, growing in big clusters at the base of stumps or from buried roots, often on oak, in late summer and fall. Every year someone mistakes it for a chanterelle and spends a very bad night. It is not usually deadly, but it causes severe vomiting and cramps.

A curiosity: the gills of a fresh jack-o'-lantern give off a faint greenish glow in total darkness. Take a cluster into a dark closet, let your eyes adjust for a few minutes, and see. Then throw it away.

Deadly galerina. A small, plain brown mushroom with a ring, growing on rotting wood, often right among honey mushrooms. It carries the same poison as the destroying angel. Its spore print is rusty brown; the honey mushroom's is white. Spore-print every cluster of honeys you bring home.

Earthballs. They look like puffballs from the outside, but cut one open and it's firm and dark, purple-black inside, even when young. Poisonous. A puffball you mean to eat must be pure white inside.

Inky caps and alcohol. The common inky cap is edible, but if you drink alcohol within a few days of eating it, before or after, you can be flushed, sick and frightened, with a racing heart. Skip the beer.