My folks just moved to a new house up in Maine, and they’ve got loads of fungi popping up everywhere. They’ve asked for an identification guide for Christmas. Does anyone have good/bad experiences with particular mushroom guides that cover the Northeastern U.S.?
They’re not stupid, they won’t eat anything without being very, very certain of the identification or consulting a local expert, but they’d like to be able to identify what’s growing on their land even if they’re not eating it.
The best field guide I think is still this one, Mushrooms Demystified. The only caveat is that it is rather Pacific-coast centric. However most of what he covers is North America-wide.
It will get you to common things and close on other stuff. However…unlike things like birds or snakes, there is no such thing as a definitive field guide to North American mushrooms. It is to speciose of a group, with far too many obscure members ( some still being described ) for that to be practical. Shoot, some things can only be properly identified with a good microscope and some chemical reagents.
I haven’t I’m afraid, but the late Orson Miller was definitely an expert taxonomist and unlike Arora, an academic. It’s probably a fine book, but I’d still recommend Arora’s first as it is almost certainly more all-encompassing. Then again it wouldn’t hurt to get both, as Arora’s is pretty bulky for the field ( he has a much shorter pocket guide to common fungi as well ) :).
I have the Falcon Guide that you linked to. Not that I’m a fungophile or anything, I just bought it on a whim on vacation at Oregon Caves. I almost got the Smithsonian Guide, but it didn’t come with a free poster. Shows you how I shop.
The Falcon Guide is printed on heavy stock with tons and tons of color photos. It has more information than I’ll ever need, that’s for sure. I wish it gave the common names for the various species, though.