Before taking a group of hikers into the forest, Michael Sijbom, director of the Landscape Overijssel foundation, throws in his regular autumn joke. One asks the other: are all mushrooms in the forest edible? Says the other: all mushrooms are edible, only some only once.
It is mid-October, it is soaking wet outside and the trees show what else they have to offer in terms of color besides greenery. In short, autumn has begun and in Natura 2000 area Dal van de Mosbeek, against the Overijssel border with Germany, one of the more popular walks is about to start this Saturday. Spotting mushrooms.
Every year around this time, when the mushrooms sprout from the moist soil, the National Poisons Information Center (NVIC) of the UMC Utrecht warns about the danger of wild picking. Every year twenty people are poisoned by eating wild mushrooms. Since 2019, this has been fatal for four of them.
‘The actual number of poisonings is probably higher, because not all cases are reported to us,’ says Henneke Mulder-Spijkerboer of the NVIC. So do not pick them, is her advice, and thus prevent stomach and intestinal complaints, or worse: liver damage, kidney problems or hallucinations. ‘It is a very specialist subject, and practice shows that many people overestimate their knowledge.’
ace scent
On Saturday, guide Ruud Reenalda of Landscape Overijssel has no intention of filling that gap. ‘We are now moving towards a very special species,’ he says enthusiastically. “Can you smell it yet?” The specimen protrudes from the ground like a phallus between the bushes. The stink fungus. With a few flies on the pointed, slightly convex top, which are attracted to the ‘carrion scent’.
The stink fungus is an insidious species. The ‘devil’s egg’ from which the mushroom grows and the young stem are edible, but older mushrooms are poisonous. In the mushroom universe there are so many dubious and poisonous doubles of edible species that guide Reenalda does not make any statements about edibility during his tours.
“I don’t even want to know,” he says. ‘Because I don’t pick and I don’t want to give wrong advice.’ The guide thus uses the same disclaimer as its most important prompter: Kees Kervels, author of the time-honoured Handy Walking Fan Mushrooms. The booklet guides the reader – under his own responsibility – through all types.
Wild picking is officially prohibited in the Netherlands, but Landscape Overijssel, Staatsbosbeheer and other site managers usually turn a blind eye. As long as forest rangers don’t see people leaving the forest with bags full. They see the popularity of wild-picking growing, but most pickers seem quite aware of the risks.
It is mainly Poles and other Eastern Europeans, with a rich culture of wild harvesting, who become poisoned here. And just like at home, they sometimes make a mistake, for example with the extremely poisonous green tuberous manite, which looks a lot like the kind that everyone has seen on their plate: the mushroom. With the influx of Ukrainians, a new risk group has emerged. The first reports of poisoned Ukrainians have already arrived at UMC Utrecht, which is wondering how to reach Eastern Europeans with its information.
Look at that birch mushroom!
Sijbom and Reenalda of Landscape Overijssel have a different goal with their mushroom knowledge. They want to arouse amazement, in the hope that it will turn into admiration and ultimately the urge to preserve all that beauty. Because look at that birch fungus, which at first sticks to the tree like a balcony. And once he has toppled that same tree, he turns a quarter turn on the horizontal stump in order to be able to deposit his tracks on the ground in that new condition as well.
Guide Reenalda can’t stop talking about the interplay in nature between mushrooms, trees, insects and, in the Netherlands, the inevitable human beings. Take the old pollard oaks, which served as a cattle fence until the arrival of barbed wire. After pollarding, a fungus in the roots causes white rot, which in turn attracts the largest and very rare stag beetle. Or the juniper, which is having a hard time in the Valley of the Mosbeek. Presumably because the fungus that the plant needs is suffering from an excess of nitrogen.
Ineke Oude Avenhuis (65) finds it all very interesting. ‘No, this one is completely red’, she says, bent over a mushroom that has yet to be identified. The conclusion is clearly not a fly agaric, without the white dots. “It could be a milk fungus.”
Like most participants in the walk, Oude Avenhuis does not mind taking and preparing a mushroom. ‘Anyone who likes mushrooms should go to the store’, says director Sijbom. Mushroom enthusiast Hans Juurlink (61), who often joins one of the roughly one hundred organized walks of Overijssel Landscape, does not need to be convinced. “If I buy them at the supermarket, I’m sure I’ll still be there tomorrow, and then I can eat mushrooms again.”