It’s far from mushroom season here in the frozen depths of a Maine winter. Yet, to my surprise, I’ve been finding all sorts of colorful fungi in the snowy wilderness.
Eager to learn more about Maine’s wintertime mushrooms, I reached out to a couple of local mycologists — fungus experts — to ask them what to look for and where.
First, I wanted to know what types of mushrooms I could hope to find.
“There’s a whole series of fungi that can tolerate reasonably cooler temperatures,” said Pete Avis, who teaches courses about fungi and plants at the University of Maine and has a doctorate in plant and fungal biology from the University of Minnesota. “So, if you’re out on a hike, you might see a couple of mushrooms popping up in the dead of winter.”
For example, Flammulina velutipes, a mushroom commonly known as winter mushroom or velvet foot, thrives in cold weather. It grows in clusters on rotting wood from fall through spring, often emerging during winter thaws. The mushroom’s rubbery, round caps vary from yellow to reddish brown, which certainly stand out in a frozen landscape.
“You’ll find it in February on the sunny side of logs,” Avis said. “A patch warms up in the sun, and it’s moist, and the mushroom grows.”
Another common winter sight? Jelly mushrooms, which look and feel like Jell-O. Jellies respond quickly to water. If it rains, they rehydrate, which causes them to brighten and expand, Avis said. He sometimes places jelly mushrooms in water to show his students this phenomenon.
So, any time it rains in the winter, these mushrooms can become a lot more noticeable.
I recently found a yellow jelly mushroom called witch’s butter on a downed tree limb near my house. It was so large and bright that, from afar, I thought it was something man-made, like a piece of plastic.
I wasn’t expecting to see something so vibrant in the woods in January.
Then, during a walk at Jordan Homestead Preserve in Ellsworth, I spotted clusters of orange, clear and brown jelly fungi. They appeared to have rehydrated and expanded during a recent rainstorm, then froze as the temperature dipped.
Some of the most common mushrooms we observe in winter are woody polypores, said Michaeline Mulvey, a longtime member of the Maine Mycological Association. Growing chiefly on trees, these tough mushrooms include artist’s conk, tinder conk, cinnabar polypore, turkey tail, purple-bottom polypore, red-belted polypore and many more.
“Most of the woody mushrooms we’re looking for in winter are rotters. They’re decomposers,” Mulvey said.
So where can we find these hardy mushrooms? Mulvey suggests visiting a mature forest, whether that’s in your backyard or at a local preserve or park.
“Try to pick an older forest with some downed logs and branches,” she suggested. “Younger forests tend to not be as mycologically rich.”
In Maine alone, the Maine Mycological Association has identified more than 2,000 species of macrofungi, which are fungi that produce visible fruiting bodies — or mushrooms.
During the winter, they plan at least one group fungi walk to look for some of these woody polypores, jellies and other wintertime mushrooms.
“There are so many different levels and ways that people approach mushrooms,” Mulvey said. “It’s the challenge of knowing what’s around you, to be able to recognize it.”
Some people forage for edible mushrooms. Others, like me, enjoy simply observing or photographing them.
“They’re very photogenic, aren’t they?” Mulvey said. ”I walk in the woods every day, and they appear and disappear, so they keep walks interesting.”
Mulvey and I talked about the challenges of identifying mushrooms, and she shared that one of her favorite field guides is William Rudy’s “Mushrooms of West Virginia and the Central Appalachians.”
It includes many of the mushrooms we have here in Maine, and Mulvey enjoys his thorough descriptions. So, I’ll be purchasing that for my library.
Mulvey also sang praises for mycoquebec.org, a database of more than 3,300 mushrooms compiled by Canadian mycologists.
Mushroom enthusiasts also seek out lichens during the winter. Lichen is a combination of fungi and algae living in partnership, and many varieties, such as the red-tipped British soldier lichen, remain colorful and showy even in the bitter cold.
“Another thing mycologists do is spend the winter with a microscope, looking at different structures to help ID mushrooms and further their understanding of them,” Avis said. “Fungi — the spores and cellular structures — are really fantastic under the microscope.”
In my quest to learn more about wintertime mushrooms, I got a better understanding of the vastness of the fungi world, and the many mysteries it contains.
Two mycologists that I called said they wouldn’t be much help on the topic since they study fungi that’s invisible to the naked eye. And Avis primarily researches fungi found in soil that lives mutualistically with trees, at the roots.
What’s more, the mushrooms we see are just a part of a much larger organism.
“The mushroom you see out there is analogous to an apple on an apple tree,” Avis said. “There’s a lot more to the apple tree than the apple. It’s the same with fungus. There’s a lot more to the fungus than that mushroom.”
In other words, the forest contains a lot more fungi than we might imagine. Still, there’s a lot to see, even after the snow falls.
“I think it just gets you out into the forest,” Mulvey said about looking for mushrooms. “It just gives you another excuse to be out there.”