President's Message

This year’s spring mushroom season started as dry as an old polypore but ended in a soggy splash! Prior to May Minnesota was in an official drought condition. The National Drought Mitigation Center (NDMC) declared Minnesota to be in the “D1 - Moderate Drought" or "D2 - Severe Drought" categories. That all changed on May 11, when downpours started to saturate the state, causing flooding in Roseau and Marshall counties, and finally resulting in one of the wettest Mays in Minnesota history. May precipitation is generally about 2 inches, but the this year the Twin Cities got over 6 inches and some areas in the state got 10 inches. On top of that, May 2004 was among the coldest Mays on record. To the delight of us mycophiles, the end result was a profusion of fungi. I don’t recall a spring that produced such an abundance and diversity of mushrooms.

The diversity was amply demonstrated at the first Minnesota BioBlitz, which took place on June 11 – 12 at the Tamarack Nature Center in Whitebear Township. A “BioBlitz” is a survey of all living organisms within a specific area. Over a period of 24 hours an army of naturalists, entomologists, herpetologists, ornithologists and mycologists scoured Tamarack trying to track down every last species. MMS was invited to participate, along with our mycologist adviser, Dave McLaughlin and his grad student, Maj Padamsee. The public also joined us on walks.

We had our MMS exhibit set up in the Tamarack headquarters. Our traveling exhibit is evolving nicely, thanks to the creative energy of Maxine Bethke and Dawn Cameron. We were able to talk with a number of visitors, who were quite interested in the fascinating fungi that we were finding. One of the children among the visitors was a precocious 10-year-old girl, who was a self-avowed “mushroom freak”. She told us her favorite mushroom was the “fly agaric” and that she had had sat in a field in Holland surrounded by Amanita muscaria with bright red and white caps. A little later she came in the building quite excited and told me she had a surprise for me. She made me close my eyes and led me by the hand outdoors. When I was allowed to open my eyes, I beheld multitude of Agrocybe fruiting bodies covering wood chips around some shrubs. While collecting the agrocybes I got pretty excited too, when I found 2 different species of bird’s nest fungi (Crucibulum laeve and Cyathis striatus) hiding in the chips, which would have gone unnoticed without the help of my guide.

It didn’t take long to start finding mushrooms at Tamarack. The lawn between the parking lot and the entrance of the nature center headquarters was peppered with scores of beautiful wine caps (Stropharia rugusoannulata), interspersed with clusters of Psathyrella candolleana. There were seven of us collecting fungi. We were amazed when we tallied up the number of different species at the end of the 24-hour period. The total was a whopping 64 species of fungi, including some which were a first for Ramsey County. (Look ahead in this newsletter for commentary from Dave McLaughlin and a full list of fungi found.) The grand total of species for the BioBlitz was 707 different organisms. The Bioblitz was a great success, and MMS played a vital role.

Ron Spinosa
ronspin@juno.com