Amanita muscaria mushrooms are known to cause hallucinations. (ID 91526759 © Leszekkobusinski | Dreamstime.com)

By Kenneth Cheung

WILD MUSHROOMS

‘Know the dangerous ones’: Sask. mushroom picker shares safety tips ahead of foraging season

Apr 16, 2025 | 4:26 PM

As the forests and meadows of Saskatchewan come back to life each spring/summer season, they bring with them a lively bounty — wild mushrooms.

But as interest in foraging grows, Donovan Thiessen has one message for beginners: learn the dangerous species first or don’t pick at all.

“There are potentially dozens of species of toxic mushroom in Saskatchewan, and there’s no rule,” said Thiessen, a mushroom expert based in Meadow Lake who runs a Facebook group for foragers with over 10,000 members.

“Each [kind of] mushroom has some mushrooms like enoki — they have like four or five different lookalikes and several of them are lethal.”

With mushroom season underway, Thiessen said Saskatchewan offers a surprising range of edible species, noting that August, September and October are what he considers the best time.

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“In the spring there wouldn’t be too terribly many to begin with. There would be morels and gyromitra species. But very quickly it would become hundreds of different species. Hundreds and hundreds,” he said.

“There’s about 150 species, probably, in this province that you could consider edible.”

Among his favourites are indigo milk caps, saffron milk caps, oyster mushrooms, porcini mushrooms, aspen boletes, meadow mushrooms, fairy-ring mushrooms and morels.

Mushrooms are most abundant in the boreal forest regions, particularly in central to northern Saskatchewan, he added.

Donovan Thiesson created this Facebook group in 2020 to provide a place for mushroom lovers to learn from each other.

Still, Thiessen said none should be consumed without absolute certainty.

“There’s no rule. People think there are rules, and all these rules are myths,” he said. “People say, ‘Oh, bugs and animals eat it so it’s edible.’ That’s a myth. I’ve heard people say you put it in a bucket of water with an onion and it turns purple. That’s a myth. Bright coloured mushrooms are toxic. That’s a myth.”

He said the most common mistake new foragers make is focusing on edible mushrooms before learning the dangerous ones.

“I always say, if you’re going to pick mushrooms, you have to first know almost by heart the dangerous ones. You have to be very, very familiar with the dangerous ones first.”

Toxic mushrooms found in Saskatchewan include funeral bells, fibre caps, funnel caps, sulphur tufts, false morels, and deadly dapperlings.

Funeral Bells mushrooms are extremely poisonous. (Credit- Peter Norton/ British Mycological Society (BMS) )

“Funeral bells are a big one here. They’re very common,” Thiessen said. “We have a lot of cortinarius species and a lot of those species, they all kind of look the same and we know that some of the ones in the world are extremely lethal.”

He also cautioned some mushrooms can cause symptoms only years after being consumed.

“We actually have a mushroom here, it’s called brown roll-rim or wood chanterelle is what they also call it, and it has a toxin that we didn’t know existed until recently because that toxin builds up in your liver for years and years and then later on in life.”

Others, like inky caps, can react poorly with alcohol. Even species like Amanita muscaria, known to cause hallucinations, can be dangerous.

“It looks like a Mario mushroom. It’s like orange or red with white spot,” he said. “It can make you hallucinate. However, it will also make you really sick, so it’s not like the fun magic mushrooms. It’s quite a bit different.”

Inky caps mushrooms can react poorly with alcohol. (ID 210983472 © Cristian Badescu | Dreamstime.com)

Some mushrooms have features that can aid identification, like cortinarius species that sometimes develop a web-like veil over their gills when young. But Thiessen said relying on such traits is risky, since they can be hard to spot and inconsistent. Many deadly mushrooms lack distinctive features altogether.

“If you’re not sure, don’t eat it,” he said. “There are so many people that can help. Just ask. We’d rather see a picture in the group than hear about someone getting hurt.”

He also emphasized that mushroom picking is sustainable because mushrooms are just the fruit of a larger organism underground, which can regrow and often produce even more after being picked.

“Because the more you pick, they will still go out, they’ll still grow back up with the same amount,” he said.

“Mushrooms drop spores and these are microscopic, and a mushroom could be given off like you see an adult mushroom sitting there, it could have already given off half a million spores,” he said, adding that using a wicker basket helps mushrooms stay fresh and allows spores to fall through, helping spread them as you walk.

Moving forward, he will be sharing more insights at a public talk at 2 p.m. on May 2 at the Meadow Lake Library, aimed at helping more people safely enjoy Saskatchewan’s growing mushroom season.

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Kenneth.Cheung@pattisonmedia.com