A walk with a fun guy in search of fungi

Greg Miller, a mushroom enthusiast, leads a group of the fungus-curious on a walk around the Environmental Nature Center.NEWPORT BEACH -- Show Greg Miller a mushroom, and he’ll probably wax poetic.

Miller, a wildlife biologist, once worked picking wild mushrooms and selling them to stores and restaurants, and he fondly remembers the delicious varieties he’s found in Michigan and other, damper climes.

Now he contents himself with leading occasional mushroom walks at the Environmental Nature Center.

On Saturday, Miller told a group gathered to glean fungal wisdom, “With mushrooms it’s like a grown-up Easter egg hunt, because you do not know what you’re going to find.”

He didn’t expect to find much, either because there’s been no significant rain lately. Mushrooms thrive on moisture and are typically most plentiful a few weeks after a good rain.

“The drawback is we’re in a terrible region for mushrooms,” Miller said. “Sometimes these walks are just theoretical mushrooms.”

But Saturday he was lucky. After finding several large, pale, flat-headed mushrooms among the fallen leaves, Miller stressed to the mushroom seekers the most important rule: If you’re going to eat the mushrooms you find, make sure you know what they are first. Otherwise you could end up in the hospital.

Mushrooms can be identified by characteristics such as color and shape, but because the fungal kingdom contains as much variety as the animal kingdom, Miller admitted that sometimes even he gets stumped.

“You always think you can get the magic formula for picking safe ones, but apparently you can’t,” said Charlotte Art, who came from Laguna Woods to take the mushroom walk.

She eats mushrooms in salads and sometimes cooks with them, but she doesn’t plan to start hunting them wild.

“It seems a little too complicated to me, and if you make a mistake, it’s deadly,” she said.

Miller also spotted some “turkey tails” -- flat, brownish, flaky-looking affairs that grow on logs around North America. Mushrooms help decompose dead wood, Miller explained, and they can also help living trees get nutrients.

While some of Miller’s listeners were peering around for rare fungi, Gloria Godfrey was getting ideas. A junior high school teacher from Laguna Niguel, Godfrey said she might like to take her students on a mushroom walk.

Miller seemed to have instilled some of his enthusiasm for fungi into the group that came for the walk, but few will go so far as to crawl around the woods searching for a tasty morel or digging for truffles.

Bill Harvey came to the walk with his wife as a treat because he just finished his final exams at Cal State Fullerton. After 30 years as a meat cutter at Stater Brothers, he’s studying to become a math teacher.

“We love mushrooms, but I don’t know about hunting for them,” Harvey said.

“We live in Westminster. We’re real close to Little Saigon -- the stores over there have all sorts of mushrooms.”20051218irnvosnc(LA)