Fungi Find!

My fungi hunting has been on  hiatus due to a dry, hot summer.  However, the other day I was driving down the road and spotted something promising in a road median.  It was a day or so before I was able to go back and take a look, and when I did I found this:

This is not the usual green spore parasols that I tend to find in road medians around here.  The caps were dry to the feel, and there were several growing in clusters.  I pulled one out of the ground and got this:

Mushrooms can be hard to identify,but if  you want to at least narrow it down a bit, you would need to know what is underneath the cap.  In this case, hopefully you can see the pores.  This tells me that this fungi is a member of the bolete family, but to narrow it down further, it's necessary to get a spore print to see the color of the spores.   To get a spore print, you take the fungus and place it on a piece of paper, spore side down, and place a glass cup or bowl over it:

And leave it, preferably overnight.  Sometimes the fungus will start dropping spores the minute it's set down on the paper, but this one was probably old and I got almost nothing from it, even after letting it sit all night.  Since you don't always know what the color of the spore will be (the color of the fungi isn't necessarily the same color as the spores), it's helpful to get two samples if you can and try one on black paper and one on white paper.

I took another fungi from the field and cut it in half and got this:

It immediately started turning blue once it was cut in half.  Sometimes that can help in the ID, as can the shape of the stem. 

The one field guide for fungi in this area is out of date, and there are a lot of variables to consider, so getting a good ID isn't always possible.  In this case, I'm going to stick with "bolete". Without a spore print I can't be 100% sure of anything. Even though I can't be sure, though, I still have fun finding and observing what I find.  One thing is for sure:  I do not eat anything I find- even if the field guide says it could be edible.  I don't want to find out the hard way that I am wrong! When I am in the mood to eat mushrooms, I stick to the ones for sale in the grocery store.