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An amateur mycology record from central Massachusetts.
Nothing here is an edibility guide. Most entries are identified only to genus or family. Several cannot be separated from dangerous look-alikes — the all-white agarics include the destroying angels, and the red-capped boletes include species that cause serious poisoning.
Never eat a wild mushroom on the basis of a photograph, including these. If you want an identification you can act on, take it to a local mycological society with the whole fruitbody, the stipe base, and a spore print.
Each specimen is one fruitbody, or one population where the fruitbodies clearly belong together. Entries are grouped by what they are but kept separate by which mushroom they were — six violet corts from six spots are six entries, not one.
Every entry states a confidence level and what would be needed to confirm it. That second field is the honest part: most identifications here are blocked on something a camera cannot capture — a spore print, a latex test, or a stipe base that needs digging up. 54 of 111 entries are still open.
Times come from the photographs' own EXIF data. Weather is observed daily station data from the nearest airport, keyed to the date of the walk, including the seven-day antecedent rainfall — because when it rained turns out to explain more than anything else about what was found.
Identifications get revised, and the revisions are left visible rather than quietly edited away. Several entries record a call that was made, withdrawn, and in one case restored when better photographs showed the first judgement had been right after all.
A guide that only shows its successes is not much use to anyone learning.
Weather: Iowa Environmental Mesonet ASOS archive. Sites and trails: Mass Audubon and Massachusetts DCR. All photographs are the compiler's own.