Some of the Smokies’ most fascinating lifeforms live not in treetops or meadows but in an unseen network of thread-like tendrils spidering through substrates like soil and stumps. Occasionally, they burst forth to the surface, taking on an array of otherworldly forms, which we call mushrooms.
Thousands of unique mushroom species live within Great Smoky Mountains National Park. A new field guide from Smokies Life, Mushrooms of the Smokies by Jacob Kalichman with a foreword by retired Smokies science coordinator Paul Super, gives readers the tools to identify 120 of the species and species groups they’re most likely to encounter in the park. And, hopefully, to develop a lifelong appreciation for these mysterious organisms.
“I'm always hoping that
people visiting nature anywhere—especially the Smokies—find a sense of reverence for it,” Kalichman said. “And taking away a little mystery from nature doesn't have to make it less compelling. If you think of the fungal species in the Smokies like characters in a play, the play is actually more interesting if you can recognize the characters, not less.”
A worthy challenge
Kalichman has devoted much of his adult life to understanding these “characters” better, a passion that began during a rainy family vacation to Northern California in 2010. The abundance and diversity of different mushroom species made identification challenging to learn in the same way a beloved game or sport might be challenging to master—but on that first day, Kalichman made just enough progress to get hooked. He still is.
“There are so many species, so many of them are poorly understood, and there's so little infrastructure for identifying them, I wouldn't be surprised if we could keep making progress for decades and still not have beaten the game,” Kalichman said.
Now a field mycologist based in Tennessee, Kalichman continues to advance his own understanding of mushroom identification, as well as the public’s. He maintains an online compendium of genus names and suggested common names for agarics and Agaricales mushrooms at Agaric.us. Kalichman is also the author of the current edition of the National Audubon Society Mushrooms of North America field guide and the pocket Mushroom Finder field guide.
But Mushrooms of the Smokies was a unique project distinguished by a unique approach.
“Even though the total set of mushroom species that can occur might barely change from one state to the next, there are real local differences—in their relative abundances, their most prevalent habitats, and their exact features,” said Kalichman.
That’s why, “far and away” his favorite feature of the new guide is the large number of photos it contains—on average five or six per species, and for some, double that.
“That is rare, or maybe unheard of, for field guides,” he said. But he believes it’s the best way to help people learn their mushrooms; even members of the same species can vary greatly in appearance, and photos are a more effective way than text to show those differences. “I bet this approach will be common someday, but for now, I think this guide is special.”
Giving these photos their due proved a challenge for Miranda Bemis, the Smokies Life graphic designer who designed the book. Measuring just 6 inches tall and 4.5 inches wide, Mushrooms of the Smokies is a purposely pint-sized paperback, intended to fit in a jacket pocket or backpack pouch. On its pages, space is at a premium.
“We really wanted to make sure that the layout could breathe,” Bemis said, “and to show each photo with enough size to capture the detail.”
Like an Easter egg hunt for adults
Having also designed the most recent editions of the reptiles and amphibians, birds, ferns, and day hikes installments in the of the Smokies series, Bemis came to the project with ample experience with this pocket-sized layout, carefully placing and sizing each of the more than 600 photographs that appear in the book.
She also had ample experience as a mushroom appreciator. Growing up in Indiana, foraging for morel mushrooms in the springtime was a common pastime for many families, including Bemis’. After years of solely seeking morels, she began to realize that many other kinds of mushrooms grew in the woods as well, and to admire their dazzling diversity of forms and colors. After moving to the Smokies, with its record-breaking biodiversity and range of elevations and habitats, she became “borderline obsessed.”
“I’m a very slow hiker, because I want to take it all in,” she said. “To me it was like an adult Easter egg hunt, so to speak. In the Smokies mushrooms are everywhere. It became, ‘which ones haven’t I seen before?’ or ‘what is this particular mushroom?’”
The newly published guide is sure to help Bemis and other mushroom admirers answer that second question. The book’s focus is on identification, not edibility; many mushroom species are toxic, and many edible species require identification by an expert to avoid confusing them with dangerous look-alikes.
Though the 120 mushrooms profiled in Mushrooms of the Smokies represent only a small portion of the 4,000 species known to exist in the park, they consist of the species people are most likely to encounter and notice on their visits.
“It's not about the most abundant species, or the most conspicuous ones, or the most easily identified ones,” Kalichman said. “It's an empirical product of all three. It's the species that, for whatever reasons, end up with the highest number of successful identifications.”
Emphasis on utility
Each species profile includes the species name (both common and scientific) and a variety of identification-oriented information, including size, habitat, season, and cap, gill, and stem characteristics. Additionally, each page has a section on look-alikes—similar species that could be confused for the target species—and tricks to tell them apart.
“When we introduce all of these look-alikes, that’s on top of the 120 species profiled in the book, so that’s how it ends up being packed so full of different mushrooms,” said Valerie Polk, the book’s editor, who is a native of the Smokies.
For being such a small book, Mushrooms of the Smokies contains a large amount of information. But the team behind it worked hard to ensure that information is intuitively organized and understandable to a general audience.
“I think people will be helped a lot by really looking through the images in the beginning of the book that explain how Jacob describes the mushrooms, because it is a whole different kind of language,” Polk said. “In the introduction, he covers a lot of bases to try to translate this into something that the average person can understand and make it really user-friendly.”
To identify a mushroom, the first step is to review the descriptions for the 14 categories of species Kalichman chose for the book, shown on pages 16–17. After deciding which description fits best, readers should flip to that section, examine the photos to find the entry that looks most like the mushroom they’ve found, and, finally, read the species description to discover if the finer details reveal a match. Alternatively, the species profile might describe a look-alike species that turns out to be a better candidate.
There is some unique vocabulary surrounding mushrooms and mushroom identification, but a glossary at the back of the book as well as a detailed, labeled illustration of a mushroom in the introduction—created by former Kemp resident Laurie McDowell—will help readers navigate this new world as effortlessly as possible.
“Even the best mushroom identifiers aren't able to identify everything to species on sight,” Kalichman said. “It's a gradual process of getting more reliably confident about
This article originally appeared on Asheville Citizen Times: Word from the Smokies: New field guide demystifies mushrooming
