'Shrooms

[lsanderson]

Hot on the Trail of the Edible Fungi in Illinois
By STEPHEN REGENOLD

TOM NAUMAN was on the hunt, hiking staff in hand, big rubber boots on his feet, tromping downhill through dead leaves and on damp earth. The woods, a deciduous swath next to a golf course, were thick with brambles and vines.

“We’re looking for a bioluminescent log dweller,” Mr. Nauman said, stepping over a fallen oak. “It’s poisonous, too.”

It was late last month, a gray morning in central Illinois. Flat light seeped through bare branches. Mr. Nauman stopped. “Jack-o’-lantern!” he yelped, stabbing his dogwood staff toward a stump.

At his feet were three orange ears, flat mushy saucers with short stems and hairline gills. “Omphalotus olearius,” Mr. Nauman murmured, whispering the toxic mushroom’s binomial name.

We were two hours west of Chicago, downhill and out of sight in the trees beside the Crooked Knee Golf Course near Henry, Ill. Mr. Nauman, the 57-year-old owner of Morel Mania Inc., was leading a late-season mushroom hunt.

“We’ll be looking for oysters, puffballs, sulphur shelf and shaggy mane, maybe,” he had said earlier that morning in the golf course’s clubhouse, which is run by his sister, Margie Kennedy.

“Hen-of-the-woods, too,” Ms. Kennedy piped up.

Mr. Nauman has been hunting for fungi since he and Ms. Kennedy were kids, walking the woods with his head down, eyes scanning. More