Shroomies

I know I'm suposed to be PhD-ing, but a girl's got to have some light relief every now and then ;) The Mountain Leadership Assessment requires knowledge of fauna&flora, or at least some knowledge of the environment one pertains to walk through. However, I am horrible with plants&flowers and my eye-sight&hearing simply isn't accurate enough to keep up with birds. "Play to your strengths" a wiseman once said and so I did. I have decided to focus on shrooms, insects and geology.

And it's the perfect time to start with the shrooms, they are EVERYWHERE right now. My little guidebook at hand, I had a stroll around to see if I could identify a few. I walked straight into this one:

After a good ten minutes I was ecstatic, as I seemed to have found an edible one whose qualities were described as: "excellent, tastes like meal". However... at the very bottom of the page a red note warned "not to be confused with it's poisonous lookalike, see page 33". So I swiftly paged on through and indeed, there was it's seemingly exact lookalike. The only difference being that one's gills were ivory white as opposed to pink, and that the poisonous kind tends to grow in inconspicuous circles. So I stepped back from the mushroom and took a birds-eye-view of the surroundings and indeed there they were, the little buggers:

It turns out the area is inundated with Ivory Clitocybes which are so poisonous, ingestion can be fatal. I've decided a smart move would be to refrain from trying to eat any of the shrooms until I've become sufficiently skilled to properly identify them! Nature is VERY sneaky.