By Jessica Sims The Book: Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures (2020) by Merlin Sheldrake, 368 pages Mushrooms are having a moment. Workshops, books, and classes on wild mushroom foraging abound, while fantastic fungi can be found populating books and TV shows. But these incredible organisms, albeit [...]
by Robert Courteau, president of the Ottawa Mycological Society It was a glorious sunny day on Saturday, September 24th when members of the Ottawa Mycological Society and of the Ottawa Field Naturalists’ Club came together at MacSkimming Outdoor Education Centre to contribute observations to the Great North American FungiQuest. MacSkimming Outdoor Education Centre, just outside [...]
On April 6th, Joan Heyding and Lynn Ovenden showed photos and passed around dried specimens of polypore fungi. We looked at characters such as the size and shape of the fruiting body and its pores, which are useful for telling species apart. We told stories about woodpeckers and some insects who live intimately with wood rot... beetles, [...]
by Lynn Ovenden The Ottawa-Carleton school board's MacSkimming Outdoor Education Centre is a wonderful place just west of Rockland, with marshy shoreline along the Ottawa River, old meadows and ponds on the nearshore slopes, and a mature, upland mixed forest with lots of hemlock and beech. Once a year, staff invite the general public to [...]
By Jessica Sutton Jessica Sutton is a 2nd-year University of Ottawa student in Environmental Studies and Biology. This fall, Jessica is volunteering with the OFNC through the Community Service Learning (CSL) program. On October 4, 2014, I attended the Mushrooms of MacSkimming event at the MacSkimming Outdoor Education Centre. MacSkimming Outdoor Education Centre opened in 1967 as [...]
