-------- Original Message -------- Subject: Impromptu mushroom foray tomorrow, Leona Heights/Merritt College Date: 2014-03-09 17:57 From: Peter Werner <germpore(a)sonic.net> To: Merritt Microscopy list <MerrittMicroscopy(a)yahoogroups.com>om>, BAMS List <BayAreaMushrooms(a)yahoogroups.com>om>, Nerds for Nature BioBlitz group <nfn-bioblitz(a)googlegroups.com>om>, Ron Felzer <rfelzer(a)peralta.edu>du>, Loralei Dewe <lldewe(a)gmail.com> Hi - I'll be leading a mushroom foray in Leona Heights Park and perhaps the main portion of Merritt College campus tomorrow (Monday) at 10 AM to Noon. It's a short-notice, strike-while-the-iron-is-hot event, scouting out the possibility of a more formal and widely-announced event next week. Meeting place: York Trailhead, across Campus Drive from Merritt College. Map here: https://goo.gl/maps/CJw08 NOTE: The first part of the foray is "Leona Heights Park", NOT "Leona Canyon Regional Open Space", the latter of which has a trailhead on the other side of Merritt College, a considerable source of confusion. Leona Heights Park is a benignly neglected property of City of Oakland, and generally a place where amateur naturalists can operate without official sanction. Various Merritt classes take advantage of its proximity as a site for nature walks. Afterward (noon) - for those who are interested, I might be able to lead a small group through mushroom microscopy at the Merritt College Microscopy classroom if there is interest. For those who are not familiar with wild mushrooms in California - wild mushroom fruiting follows a definite seasonal pattern, analogous to the large scale blooming of flowering plants during a given time in Spring, and is variable dependent on weather conditions during a given year. The majority of mushrooms in California fruit in late Autumn, after the first large rains of saturated the dry soil, and generally before temperatures become their coldest. Smaller fruitings of often different species of mushrooms generally follow through Winter and into Spring. This year, due to extremely unusual weather conditions, we are having a full scale fruiting of fall mushroom species some 3 months late. We are probably at the peak of our mushroom season now, and it may or may not extend further depending on if more rain will come in the next week or not. Peter