NATURE: A free feast or a heavy price?

This final, unwilling acknowledgement that summer has once more passed us by with barely a nod in our direction is becoming only too familiar.
We find compensation in the woods and in the fields, where mushrooms provide a seasonal glut of learning opportunities and a feast for those who put in the time.
Each year brings interesting anomalies. This one, for instance, has so far failed to produce the goods in terms of fungi dependent on summer’s heat, such as golden chanterelle and one of my favourites, the proper penny bun or porcini.
I would gather for profit if I could, but the law, wise as it is, forbids such a thing. If I go to a gourmet greengrocer I can buy such variety of wild mushrooms, some of which have come here from halfway round the world.
Porcini come from sub-alpine pine forest in central and southern Europe, chanterelle and pied-de-mouton from oak woods in France, oyster mushrooms hail even from China. All are picked by professional foragers and sold first to wholesalers, then to retailers and finally to me, should I find myself unable to step outside my door and into the woods where such things grow.
Along the way we have packaging, handling, transport with diesel fumes and air miles – no wonder they are so expensive. One Irish supermarket has priced dried porcini at more than €150 per kilo!
I continue to do my best, visiting favourite haunts and past picking places. Along the way I found such delights as the charcoal burner – a muddy-purple, palm-sized mushroom with a firm texture and great flavour that is sometimes found in large troupes – and an early flush of oh-so-tasty winter chanterelles. The latter normally appear from the middle of next month, alongside rightly feared death caps and smaller, edible pine boletes.
And, as I often do, I came across something new. This time it was a close relation of the death cap, the panther cap. Or was it?
All mushrooms have clearly defining features. Take the blusher, for instance. Another relative of the death cap (both are in the Amanita family), the blusher has an ochre-coloured cap that bears a number of lighter coloured scales. The bottom of the stem bruises pinkish-brown, and if the cuticle, or skin layer, of the cap is peeled, that same colour appears when the flesh is exposed to air. Importantly, the blusher wears a skirt around the top of the stem, which is marked with longitudinal lines and nothing else.
If all these features are consistent in all the blushers that find their way into our basket, and if we take care to prepare them properly then we can safely sit down to a very tasty mushroom risotto. But if just one of the collection has a ring around the stem with no lines or striations, or if the flesh of another remains white on exposure to air, our experience is likely to take a turn for the worse, for it is likely we have our teeth into Amanita pantherine, the panther cap.
Unpleasant symptoms of poisoning will likely follow. These include involuntary muscle twitching accompanied by stages of hyperactivity (a combination which might make for interesting viewing but might not be especially enjoyed by the unwitting consumer), acute respiratory failure, unconsciousness, hallucinations and delirium, along with a racing heart and bouts of vomiting.
After eight hours or so these symptoms begin to abate.
And so, when I found my panther caps growing in mixed woodland I was naturally curious. Everything looked right (or wrong, if you like) about them, except for the fact they were tall and slim rather than short and stumpy. Even allowing for variation in form left me in doubt.
Later, with a specimen laid before me, I went through a number of books to learn more. And there it was – another Amanita, the snakeskin grisette, a rare and edible (if not altogether recommended) find in this part of the world.
Armed with knowledge, I took my specimen to the kitchen, where I began to have doubts. All the features were right, weren’t they? They were indeed, except one. The snakeskin has no ring on the stem, yet there, when I looked more closely, were the remains of that key feature.
Estimates for the total number of fungi species on the planet range from 500,000 to several million. The number-one rule for foragers must always be: If in doubt, throw it out.
Cheese omelette today, then.

Michael Kingdon, a naturalist and keen fisherman, lives on the shores of Mayo’s Lough Carra, the best example of a shallow marl lake in western Europe and an SAC of enormous ecological and conservation importance.