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   I am rather new to the field of mycology so when I find an unfamiliar mushroom, I do serious research on them before preparing them for a gourmet meal. I have hunted morel mushrooms for years and they are easy to identify. I only recently discovered many more mushrooms growing wild in our area are delicious to eat. In my research, I have also discovered “toxic” is a relative term. Some sources use the term toxic to mean it will kill a person in short order. Any thing else that will make a person mildly to severely ill is referred to as a mild gastric irritant. I would prefer a more standard classification that would group any mushroom that is going to make a person sick as “Do Not Eat.” That way, a person would know if they eat something on the Do Not Eat list, they are going to be sick, somewhere between mildly nauseated and dead. I will just skip these ones.

   The mushrooms I forage can not be easily confused with something with varying degrees of toxicity. These include puffballs, chicken of the woods, golden and pearl oysters as well as the common morel. Last week, my son told me about some mushrooms growing along one of the trails in the woods. He was not sure what they were but took a picture and said there were a lot of them. My immediate thoughts were that he had found the mother lode of chanterelles. Chanterelle mushrooms are highly sought after as they are one of the best tasting mushrooms around. They are used extensively in French cooking and pair well with steaks or about anything else a person can think of to put with them. I was excited at the possible find. My wife and I immediately went out to find them.

   From a distance, we spotted the large clusters of mushrooms growing on and near a dead oak tree. On closer inspection, they did not look exactly like chanterelles are supposed to. I picked a few and headed back to the house to do more research. My reference material confirmed that these delicious looking mushrooms were not the much sought after chanterelles. I checked their section on look-alikes and found a picture that looked exactly like the mushrooms we had. The common name for them is jack-o-lantern. There are many similarities between jack-o-lanterns and chanterelles. The color is similar though generally more orange in jacks. The shape is very close, but chanterelles are generally smaller. To me neither of these made a definitive confirmation one way or the other. A person would have to have each side by side to compare color and size. The difference that confirmed my suspicion was that chanterelles grow in small clusters while jack-o-lanterns grow in large groups. This was definitely a large group. My source said, the toxicity level of Jacks is not high. If a person mistakenly eats them, they will vomit for four to six hours. To me, that seems fairly toxic and something I will do my best to avoid. They may not kill you, but for four to six hours you might wish you were.

   One other interesting feature of jack-o-lantern mushrooms is they are supposedly bioluminescent. At times, they will glow in the dark bright enough to read by. At a stage in their growth cycle, they will put off a blue-white light to attract insects. Since we found this to be a curious adaptation for a mushroom, my wife and I waited until after dark to check it out. Our glow in the dark mushrooms were not glowing. Either this was not the right time in their life cycle or the source of my information was not entirely accurate, as in vomiting for six hours show a mushroom to be only mildly toxic.

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