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Meadow? Horse? Something else?


angela

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I have no plans to eat this lone, past-prime mushroom, but I would like to know for the future if it looks like a meadow or a horse mushroom.  

The cap was lighter in the field, but it had been about three hours from picking to photography.  I found it in a grassy, car-wide, sunny trail with trees along the trail in a state wildlife management area (they outright allow mushrooming, which is nice).  Horses use the trail (I don't know if there is a connection between horses and horse mushrooms).

The cap measures about 2.25" in diameter and it has dark, espresso-brown spore prints.  It smells pleasantly mushroomy.

Can anyone confirm or refute my guesses?  Thanks.

 

 

meadow4.jpg

meadow3.jpg

meadow1.jpg

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Horse Mushrooms are normally pretty large and typically have a "cogwheeled" ring; so your specimen is likely to be the Meadow Mushroom, especially if it smells like store-bought button mushrooms.  Both of those mushrooms appreciate horse manure in their habitat.

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I just want to add that it looks like there's some yellow staining on the stem. Some --not all-- yellow-staining species of Agaricus are known to cause illness. But these types generally have an unpleasant odor... medicinal, phenol, chemical. Horse Mushrooms --members of the Agaricus arvensis group-- sometimes show a bit of yellow stain on the stalk base. But Horse Mushrooms have a pleasant almondy odor. 

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The cap of that mushroom looks dirty. Did you brush dirt off it before you took the photo?

To me it resembles Agaricus bitorquis aka the sidewalk mushroom. Once you are certain a mushroom is in fact an agaricus the way to tell if it is a bitorquis is to look at the ring around the stem. The bitorquis is a bit unique in that the edge of the ring closest to the cap is a bit loose and raised and so is the edge that is closest to the ground, so both edges are raised up a bit. Actually the name bitorquis loosely translates to 2 collars which refers to the double raised feature. Many Agaricus emerge cleanly and show a nice clean white cap. Not so with bitorquis, which only barely fully emerges and seeing quite a bit of dirt on the cap is normal. They are called sidewalk mushrooms because they have a real affinity for hard packed soil. I have seen them fruit in the middle of a hard packed gravel road and there are reports of them pushing up through asphalt. I have a nice little patch that fruits right beside my gravel driveway every year and gives me a half dozen really tasty mushrooms. Here is a vid I made beside the driveway:

and here is a link to a text description:

http://urbanmushrooms.com/index.php?id=19

Of course none of this means your mushroom was a bitorquis but from the photo Im leaning that way.

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I did not brush dirt off before taking the photo.  The mushroom was much lighter at the time it was picked than at the time it was photographed.  I agree the stem seemed to be stained yellow a bit.  The odor was quite pleasant, but not almondy.  

Next time I find something like this, I'll have a better idea of what to look for.  This mushroom is long gone in the trash, and the trash was picked up this morning.

 

Thanks for your help.

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