Francis Hickenbottom’s Nature Notes.
When my daughter saw me producing the image for this page, she asked, “Why are you
painting such an ugly toadstool?” I was surprised because I have always thought that
shaggy ink-caps are rather attractive fungi.
Shaggy ink-caps like compacted ground and at Ackworth School, they emerge every year
from the short grass behind the Sports Hall, where a significant amount of earth-moving
must have taken place when the Sports Centre was built not very many years ago.
I don’t make a habit of picking and eating fungi, but I have eaten some of the ink-caps
because they are so easy to identify. I found them to be very good to eat. They need
to be picked whilst they are still young but I can’t imagine anyone picking them
once they have aged and started to drip the black ‘ink’.
At Ackworth, common ink-caps sometimes appear near the shaggy ink-caps. Eating of
the common ink-caps has to be avoided because they cause sickness if consumed within
twenty four hours of drinking alcohol.
There have been plenty of other fungi around in local woods in recent days. One species
which I had not noticed previously is amethyst deceiver. I found lots of these dotted
around on the floor of a wood and they really did have an colour somewhere between
blue and amethyst. Also, I found lots of woolly milk-caps. I tasted the milk of these
by dipping my finger in it and touching the tip of my tongue. Within moments, the
tip of my tongue was burning. The sensation was like that produced by chilli-peppers.
