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Heat and humidity in the forecast usually means rough, sticky days. But for members of New York Mycological Society, those are peak conditions for fungus hunting.
The club members gather in parks throughout the boroughs for walks with the express purpose of searching for, documenting and appreciating mushrooms and other fungi. The walks take place on weekends throughout the year, but the swampy dog days of summer and early fall are when fungi thrive. Rainy weather makes for particularly good fungus sightings.
Their pursuit mixes the whimsy of birding with the rigor of citizen science. The novelty keeps people coming back.
“It’s very rare to discover a new species of tree or even bird in New York City, but it’s very easy to find a new species of plant or mushroom in New York City,” said Sigrid Jakob, the society’s president. “There’s just the opportunity to break new ground and discover something truly remarkable, even just on a casual walk.”
he organization, founded by composer John Cage and his friends in 1962, boasts over 1,300 members who pay $20 in annual dues and get together for the weekly walks, plus book clubs, lectures and festivals. They have come across over 1,600 species of fungus in the five boroughs in six-plus decades, usually recording them in iNaturalist,a popular platform for fungi enthusiasts.
Vivian Young, a 63-year-old retiree from The Bronx, joined the society after meeting members tabling at a fair several years back. She loved flowers and birds, but then she realized “how pretty” fungi can be, she said. She remained captivated by their beauty and elusiveness.
“Things grow at any time, and sometimes you go back to a place where you saw a lot of fungus, but then there’s, like, nothing,” she said, referring to the unpredictable, ever-changing nature of the activity and the fungi themselves.
Fungi allow ecosystems to function, and are essential for healthy soils and plants.
“Fungi play a humongously important role in ecologies … They’re the sort of glue that holds everything together,” Jakob said. “They’re these invisible helpers that help ecosystems thrive.”
There are possibly tens of millions of fungal species, yet only about 150,000 have been classified. That means there’s ample opportunity for society members to contribute to a growing body of knowledge about a form of life that’s often overlooked compared to animals, flowers or trees.
Jakob’s most recent discovery was a small fungus she found last winter, growing on goose poop. The fungus “makes its own carpet that it covers itself with,” she said. Below the carpet are “little black cannonballs” and inside of those are “cool-looking spores that look fantastic under the microscope,” she said.
She and another mycologist gave the fungus a name — Sporormiella tela — and published a paper on it.
The parks that are best for fungi searching are, Jakob said, “a little bit less visited, a little bit more lush and a little bit less poopy” — places like Staten Island’s High Rock Park plus Forest Park and Alley Pond Park in Queens. She said Prospect Park tends to be the group’s least favorite because of the crowds that trample the fungus and the lack of bathrooms, which means members find toilet paper and other “unwelcome debris” wherever they look for fungi.
On a Sunday in June, before the real heat of the summer set in, nearly 50 people of all ages met up for a fungi hunt at The Bronx’s Van Cortlandt Park, one of the members’ favorite parks for the activity.
Some carried walking sticks, and others wore T-shirts and tote bags with fungi-related graphics. Immersed in observation, they meandered along with their phones out to take photos, obstructing the trails for multiple passing cyclists.
Others crouched around a tree stump to peer through their loupe magnifiers — handheld lenses — to get a closer look at a dark gray fungus known as dead man’s fingers. Stacey Tokhtamysh, 29, put a piece of it into a plastic tackle box for closer inspection later.
Like many people who are active with the Mycological Society, the Bushwick resident’s entrypoint to the wide world of fungi came from her interest in foraging edible mushrooms.
“I really missed collecting mushrooms, and I’m originally from Ukraine, where it’s more common, but here it’s not that widespread,” Tokhtamysh said.
The Mycological Society generally discourages foraging mushrooms to eat, as it’s against city rules to do so.
Paul Sadowski, a walk leader, emphasized that identification required careful study of a fungus’ anatomy and features, as well as finding out where and when it grows — and most importantly, exercising patience.
“You need to get all those variables, notice and describe them, and that’s what will lead you to a rational decision on how to identify the mushroom,” he said. “It’s not something that you can learn in any one class or seminar. It’s something that you need to develop over a long period of time.”
That day at the park, Sadowski pointed out a bracket fungus hanging like a shelf midway up the trunk of a black locust tree. Members of the group brought him what they found and asked for his insight. The pursuit is an inherently social activity, with participants sharing knowledge in person and in online communities.
By the end of the walk, everyone laid out what they’d collected and tried to identify them. Sometimes people take their specimens home to examine them beneath a microscope, perform DNA sequencing or consult their guidebooks.
The understanding that fungi are everywhere adds a new dimension to hikes and everyday walks, said Ami Kumari, 40, of the Upper East Side. She logs what she finds in the iNaturalist app.
“There’s a lot more than what you actually just see,” she said. “So much variety, so much diversity — just like humans.”
