In Search of WonderOff trail with an Oregon State undergraduate mushroom foray.

There was a steady drizzle drumming against the fall foliage when I arrived at Oak Creek with the rest of Associate Professor Jessie Uehling’s mycology class. The sky was gray, but the forest floor was an explosion of fall colors. Baskets in hand, we dispersed, all of us rooting through the wet leaf litter, our eyes close to the ground — or walking slowly through it, scanning for colors or shapes that stood out against the busy backdrop.

I was tagging along as an observer, not a student, but every flash of color on the forest floor still sent my heart racing. My eyes played tricks on me: at one point, I mistook a nail in a log for a mushroom, reaching out hopefully to touch it. Other times, I brushed aside leaves to reveal a wet, slightly sticky brown cap, or found greenish shelf mushrooms on a rotting stump Uehling moved between groups, guiding their hands-on identification processes. “What do you smell?” she asked one student, who was holding a small white mushroom with a feathery underside. The group passed the mushroom around, bringing it carefully to their noses. “Some people say this one smells like green corn.”

We think that we understand maybe 5% of the fungal species that are out there.

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Several years ago, in my early 20s, I bought a mushroom field guide and became obsessed with fungi overnight. Before, the word “mushroom” had conjured up a mental image of gray button mushrooms from the grocery store. In my field guide, it was an entirely different story: Coral mushrooms reached up from the forest floor just like their namesake, with delicate branching limbs. Enormous puffballs ballooned from the earth, larger than a human head. Witch’s butter was smeared, jellylike, on tree trunks.

My relationship with the outdoors was forever changed. I began to notice the fungi that had always been there — in forests, yes, but also on lawns, on the side of the road, or on piles of mulch. Every time I saw one, I had to drop everything and consult my field guide.

Top Left: Associate Professor Uehling lays out specimens found during the foray.  Top Right:  Getting up close with a mushroom. Bottom:  Botany 461/561 students carefully scan the forest floor.

That feeling followed me when I moved from the Midwest to Oregon. As a writing MFA student working with the Oregon Stater, I’m always looking for stories that connect people to place — and the wet forests of the Northwest seemed to be a fungal paradise. I found myself wondering what mushroom hunting looked like in this ecoregion, and what community might exist around it at Oregon State. My curiosity brought me to Uehling’s class field trip.

“What we have here is very rare,” Uehling explained. “Most universities have maybe one mycologist in one department, but we have this kind of constellation of mycologists — probably a dozen mycologically oriented professors across different departments in the university.”

Interdisciplinary interest in fungi extends well beyond the classroom and academia. Not only do mushrooms have a growing presence in the cultural imagination right now — one of the students on this trip sported a crocheted mushroom hat — but the science of mycology is also a growing field with surprising practical applications.

“There are a lot of companies popping up now that use fungi to make interesting materials,” said Uehling. “Dairy-free cheeses, styrofoam alternatives, alternative leathers, nontoxic dyes. … The list goes on.”

New uses raise new questions about safety, oversight and environmental impact. One of the problems is a lack of information. “Compared to other fields, [mycologists] have very little baseline data on fungal populations and their distributions,” said Uehling.

Luckily, mycology is a field with a history of welcoming amateur enthusiasts like me — or like the students in Uehling’s class, whether or not they go on to pursue mycology as a career. “We’ve been partnering with regional mycology  clubs and harnessing the power of citizen science to make a running list of every fungal species in the state,” Uehling said.

Among the apps that make this kind of data collection easy is iNaturalist. It is user-friendly and AI-powered. Anyone can snap a picture of an interesting-looking fungus and upload it to its database. The result is a crowd-sourced library of geotagged specimens — perfect for research. (Check out the Oregon iNaturalist page.)

In her role as the Oregon State University Herbarium curator, Uehling harmonizes the iNaturalist datasets with OSU’s library of over 400,000 dried fungal specimens. Her mycology students’ finds will be preserved there, too — more data gathered from Oregon forests.

At the end of our class foray, we gathered by a low stone wall and looked over our bounty. Mushrooms passed carefully from hand to hand, each one an example of fungal diversity. “We think that we understand maybe 5% of the fungal species that are out there,” said Uehling. “In our databases, a small subset of species have been observed thousands of times, but there are over 4,000 species that have been observed less than 10 times. To establish a baseline understanding of fungi, and how their populations might change over time, it’s important to pay attention to the whole wealth of species around us.”

Ever since the class foray, I’ve found myself stopping to take a closer look when I notice fungi — wandering just off-trail on a hike or squatting down in lawns to examine a mushroom closely. When I inevitably notice some strange and unique detail — shaggy hairs on the cap, a tattered ring around the stalk, the intricate maze of the gills — it’s been impossible not to think of the phrase I heard Uehling say many times that day in the field: “What a beauty.”