You are viewing a single comment's thread from:
RE: Weird Plastic Baby: Fungus Edition (Missouri Ozark Mushroom Hunting: 12 Photos & Commentary)
@haphazard-hstead Thank you so much for your insight and informational resources. I am very excited to put this knowledge to use.
Do you have a particular guidebook you recommend? We have been looking at the Missouri specific book published by MDC and Audubon's guide book. Are there better ones out there that might be under radar?
One that I really like is "All That the Rain Promises and More" by David Aurora. It's for the western US, but it's the best book I know for making mushrooms seem fun, really fun, and not strange or technical. The key to families, inside the front and back cover, are really good, too. I have a YouTube video that shows me using it - here.
When I visited my parents in northern Arkansas last winter, I looked at my dad's mushroom books. His Audubon guide was clearly the most used! He has so many notes and paperclips in it, it's twice as thick as it ought to be.
He has that book by the Missouri Dept of Conservation, "Missouri's Wild Mushrooms", too. It looks like a good book, especially for getting started. I like books that do more than list species and their characteristics. I like it when they talk about foraging and have recipes, too. That shows that the folks writing the book really have been out there, rather than just editing other information into a book.
Then there's "Mushrooms Demystified". It's a great book, but it is for folks that like to look at every detail of every mushroom, with a magnifying lens, and want to talk in technical jargon, lol. I am not kidding about that! It's becoming outdated, though, as molecular chemistry is changing our understanding of what mushrooms are related to each other.
Anyway, that's a long anwer. Short answer: With that MDC book and the Audubon book, you would have a good start. The "All the Rain Promises" is a fun extra that shows mushrooms can be a big part of a fun life outdoors.