Wild Oakland Walk: Mushrooms at Lake Merritt | Oakland

Submitted by the Event Organizer

Wild Oakland Walks

Wild Oakland leads free, fun and educational guided environmental walks for busy urbanites.

They are a 100% volunteer organization, from the guiding committee to the walk leaders who donate their time because of a shared passion for ecology and education.

Saturday, December 7, 2013
Mushrooms at Lake Merrit | Wild Oakland Walks

With the first good rains of the year comes the first good bloom of fungal fruiting bodies (mushrooms) popping up everywhere. This hour long walk will encompass the grassy areas around the boathouse and the Lake Merritt gardens from noon to 2 pm on Saturday, December 7, 2013.

Free, but an RSVP is required to info@wildoakland.org. Donations are gratefully accepted.

The focus will be on learning to identify the larger mushroom species of the area and learning to read the landscape for where these various hetertrophs hide out and about their many roles in the local ecology. Lake Merritt has a wide variety of mushrooms species for such a small location.

Your guide will be Damon Tighe, an amateur mycologist or five years and former research scientist at the Joint Genome Institute, where many fungal genomes have been sequenced for biofuel applications.

Please bring guide books if you have them. A one page guide to the commonly found mushrooms will be provided. You will meet rain or shine. Tools that you may want to bring include a small pocket knife to dig with, a paintbrush to brush duff off with, and a jacket.

You are also encouraged to bring your camera for documentation or smart phone with the iNaturalist app installed, so that your observations can add to our local database of known species. This walk will not include tasting or collection of mushrooms.

Disclaimer: Please double check event information with the event organizer as events can be canceled, details can change after they are added to our calendar, and errors do occur.