Author Archives: paul sadowski

NEMF 2023 Samuel Ristich Foray — Help Needed

The Northeast Mycological Federation is busily preparing for this year’s foray that is to be held at Soyuzivka in Kerhonkson, NY September 14-17, 2023.

NEMF is a group of mushroom clubs in an area extending from Québec through New England and the Mid-Atlantic states. The sole function of the Federation is to hold an annual foray.

The Covid pandemic shut us down completely in 2020 and in 2021 we held a virtual foray. In 2022 our foray was in Jolliette, Quebec as guests of the hosting club, the Cercle des Mycologues de Montréal.

This year the hosting clubs are the Mid-Hudson Mycological Association, the Connecticut-Westchester Mycological Association, the New York Mycological Society and the Long Island Mycological Club. https://www.nemf.org/nemf-2023/nemf-2023-home/

Today I am turning to the Society for help in hosting this foray.

These are some areas of responsibility:

  1. Do you have a guest room to house a faculty member? The location should be in the Kerhonkson area.
  2. We are hosting the Friday night social, an evening meet-and-greet held after the evening program. We will be serving light prepared finger food. Drinks are provided by Soyuzivka. Any ideas for mushroomy (or not) snack items that can simply placed in bowls distributed around the room? There is no prep area so this needs to be kept extremely simple. There is funding for these provisions.
  3. We can use people to pitch in to help with the registration table during reception hours, Thursday afternoon, evening, Friday morning, Saturday morning.
  4. The foray needs emcees to introduce faculty presenting their programs Friday and Saturday, mornings and afternoons.
  5. We need Walk leaders to check foragers onto the buses and take attendance at walk’s end.
  6. The sorting and display areas require people to manage clutter, signage, materiel, and to shuttle identified collections from the sorting tables to the display room.
  7. Clean-up detail.
  8. Technical, A/V type expertise would be really helpful.
  9. And a biggie: I have volunteered to lead a beginners microscopy workshop. We will need loaner microscopes and knowledgeable people to serve as assistants. The emphasis in this class is to de-mystify the microscope for the intimidated beginner. 

Please indicate your interest in any of these chores to Paul Sadowski pabloski1@verizon.net

Tom Volk, friend of the NYMS, passes.

It is with great sadness to note the passing of Tom Volk. He has been a great friend of the NYMS, delivering lectures, participating in our walks, our 100/50 celebration in 2012, and helping us memorialize Gary Lincoff in 2018.

He specialized in the polypores but served to mentor many graduate students from his teaching post in La Crosse, Wisconsin. His FoTM, Fungus of the Month site one of the earliest blogs on mycology, https://botit.botany.wisc.edu/toms_fungi/ stands as a great resource for the mycocurious.

I had the pleasure to study polypores with Tom at Eagle Hill, Maine. He was brilliant, generous and outré, so happy to have spent time with him.

Study Lichens at Eagle Hill

I took a course at Eagle Hill some years ago with Tom Volk to study Polypores. The sheer profusion of lichens made finding polypores quite difficult! This is a great place to study lichens. – Paul Sadowski

Title: Lichens and Lichen Ecology
Instructor: Troy McMullin
Dates: May 15–21, 2022

Description: This seminar is suitable for beginners and those with an advanced understanding of lichens. It is designed to help teachers, students, those working in state or federal positions, and naturalists of all skill levels become more knowledgeable about lichens. Lichens are abundant and diverse along the coast of Maine, so participants can pursue topics of interest and develop identification skills for a wide range of species. This seminar emphasizes both fieldwork and laboratory studies. The main focus is on identification using books, keys, and chemical tests. Chemistry will be examined with ultraviolet light, spot tests, and thin layer chromatography. Instruction will be provided on how to do these tests and how to cut sections of lichens and their fruiting bodies in order to examine internal structures. Lichens from open, forested, and seashore habitats will be studied. Lectures and slide presentations will cover topics such as structure, reproduction, ecology, human uses, and pollution monitoring. This seminar is recommended before taking more specialized lichen seminars. Participants are encouraged to bring their own specimens to study.

▪ Interactive color flyer for this seminar is available here!
▪ Details a

bout costs, discounts, accommodations, and meals can be found here.
▪ COVID-19 vaccination (including booster) is required for acceptance into our seminars.

▪ Register Here
▪ General Information
▪ Online Calendar

Eagle Hill Institute
PO Box 9, 59 Eagle Hill Road
Steuben, ME, 04680-0009

Contact Us!
office@eaglehill.us
207-546-2821 Ext.4

Eagle Hill Announces 2019 Mycology Workshops

eagle-hill

May 19 – 25
Lichens and Lichens Ecology
Troy McMullin

May 26 – June 1
Old-growth Forest Lichens and Allied Fungi, With a Focus on Calicioids
Steven Selva and Troy McMullin

May 26 – Jun 1
Introduction to Bryophytes and Lichens
Fred Olday

June 16 – 22
Independent Study: Topics in Fungal Biology
Donald Pfister

July 28 – August 3
Mushroom Identification for New Mycophiles:
Foraging for Edible and Medicinal Mushrooms
Greg Marley and Michaeline Mulvey

Aug 11 – 17
Crustose Lichens, Accessory Fungi, and Symbiotic Transitions
Toby Spribille

Aug 11 – 17
Lichens, Biofilms, and Stone
Judy Jacob and Michaela Schmull

August 18 – 24
Mushroom Microscopy: An Exploration of the
Intricate Microscopic World of Mushrooms
David Porter and Michaeline Mulvey

September 27 – 29
Fall Maine Mushrooms
David Porter and Michaeline Mulvey

For a flyer that has links to individual mycology seminar info:
click here

For general information…

https://www.eaglehill.us/programs/nhs/nhs-calendar.shtml

office@eaglehill.us

Gary Lincoff (1942-2018)

Many thanks to Britt Bunyard, Publisher of FUNGI Magazine, for this beautiful tribute.

The mycological community was heartbroken on March 16, 2018 to learn of Gary Lincoff’s passing. He was the greatest mycologist of my lifetime, a great friend, and a great person. Gary was an American treasure. He was larger than life. Mycophiles and fans, upon seeing him for the first time in person, were nervous to approach—he was so famous. But he was the most welcoming, the most friendly, the most giving person I knew. That any of us knew. He gave absolutely all of his time to educating others. Every person in the mycological community in North America, and beyond, knew him. If you invoke the name “Gary,” everyone knows of whom you’re speaking.
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New York Botanical Garden Mushroom Programs

The New York Botanical Garden has been a mycological presence in New York City since its founding in the 1800s. It has been the workplace of the mycologists Lucien Underwood, Howard Bigelow, Clark Rogerson, Harry Thiers, Samuel Ristich, Roy Halling, Barbara Thiers and Gary Lincoff.
NYBG presents programs every year in mycological studies. Here are the upcoming events for the Spring & Summer 2018.

THE HIDDEN WORLD OF LICHENS

Instructor: James Lendemer

Rock pimples, fog fingers, old man’s beard— their common names are amusing, but lichens are among Earth’s most amazing and oldest living things, and display incredibly beautiful colors and shapes. They grow on bark, rock, and barren soil, and thrive in rain forests, deserts, the arctic—even environments simulating Mars! Lichens are sensitive environmental indicators, yet scientists are only just beginning to understand them. Join noted NYBG lichenologist James Lendemer for a captivating session that includes a microscope lab and a lichen hunt on the Garden grounds. Dress for the weather.

Tuesday, February 27, 2018, from 10:00am to 01:00pm, at the NYBG location

 

MUSHROOM PAPERMAKING

Instructor: Dorothy Smullen

Use bracket fungi to create beautiful, earth-toned sheets of paper under the expert guidance of mycologist Dorothy Smullen. This hands-on class will walk you step-by-step through the papermaking process, and introduce you to the many different mushrooms you can use for a variety of hues. Your friends will be Instagramming your thank you cards in no time.

Saturday, April 7, 2018, from 11:00am to 02:30am, at the NYBG location

SPRING MUSHROOMS

Instructor: Paul Sadowski

Morels, though hard to spot, occur throughout the metropolitan region, and spring is the ideal time to find them. Discover how and where to hunt for them, as well as numerous other spring mushrooms including oysters, inky caps, wine caps, dryad’s saddle, reishi, and the early-spring chicken mushroom. Learn to correctly identify mushrooms, how to differentiate them from look-alikes, and get recipes for the best ways to prepare them in a meal.

Wednesdays, 05/23/18 & 05/30/18 10:00am – 01:00pm, Midtown Center, Room A

 

MUSHROOMS & MYCORRHIZAE

Instructor: Roy Halling, Ph.D.

Join Dr. Roy Halling, NYBG’s Curator of Mycology, on an insider’s tour of the Thain Family Forest. A widely published expert on mushrooms around the world (and featured on the podcast Radio Lab!), Dr. Halling will discuss how mushrooms contribute to a forest’s health, delving into the process by which mycorrhizal roots share water and nutrients with their tree partners in exchange for carbohydrates. You’ll gather a variety of mushrooms to dissect and observe under microscopes, using stains to distinguish between plant and fungal material.

Friday, August 10, 2018, from 10:00am to 01:00pm, at the NYBG location

EMIL LANG LECTURE SERIES FOR 2018

Lectures will be held on Monday nights, from 6:00-8:00, at the Central Park Arsenal. The entrance is just off 5th Ave. at 64th St.
The Arsenal, Central Park
830 5th Ave., Rm 318 (@ 64th St.)
New York, NY 10065

February 26th

Ethan Crenson

“Blotches, Spots, and Bumps on Logs: Getting Small To Find Unknown Fungal Treasures Staring Us In the Face”

Ethan Crenson received an MFA in photography from the School of Visual Arts in NYC in the 1990s. He runs two companies, a graphic design company and a gallery/publishing house for artists’ multiples. He became interested in fungi around 10 years ago and joined the New York Mycological Society shortly thereafter. He is an active contributor to the five borough fungal survey, Gary Lincoff’s effort to inventory the fungal inhabitants of NYC. He became interested in very small fungi about three years ago.

March 19th

Roy Halling

“Mushrooms of Costa Rica: An Overview”

Roy Halling received a masters degree in 1976 at San Francisco State University with a thesis on the Boletaceae of the Sierra Nevada. He earned a docterate degree from University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 1980. He then held a two-year postdoctoral position at Harvard University at the Farlow Herbarium. In 1983 he accepted the position of assistant curator of mycology at the New York Botanical Garden, where he currently holds the position of research mycologist and curator of mycology. While in New York, he began to focus on the macrofungi of South America. He obtained a National Science Foundation grant to do a survey of the Collybia in South America. This survey began a fifteen-year collaboration with Dr. Greg Mueller to document to macrofungi of the oak forests in Costa Rica. He continues his work in Costa Rica and is actively involved in international collaboration with other specialists on the systematics, biogeography, and phylogeny of boletes, with particular emphasis in Australia and Southeast Asia.

April 23rd

Rachel Swenie

“Mushrooms with Teeth: The History, Diversity, and Edibility of the Mushroom Genus Hydnum”

Rachel Swenie is PhD student in Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at the University of Tennessee, where she studies the diversity, evolution, and biogeography of mushroom-forming fungi. She has done mycological field work throughout the southeastern US and in southern South America. Originally from Chicago, Rachel formerly ran an edible mushroom farm where she cultivated a variety of gourmet mushrooms.

May 21st

Richard Jacob

“DNA Barcoding and the Mycoflora Project”

Richard Jacob is a scientist working in the field of proteomics identifying and quantitating peptides and proteins. His work has taken him from his home town of Cambridge in the UK to Germany and the USA. He became very interested in mushrooms when he moved to Pittsburgh and found morels growing in the backyard and joined Western Pennsylvania Mushroom Club so that he could learn how to find more. Recently Richard has used his scientific background to pioneer the clubs DNA barcoding project and he is a member of the NAMA Mycoflora committee. In 2016 Richard was awarded the Harry and Elsie Knighton Service Award by NAMA for his contributions to the WPMC and wider community.