The Fungus Among Us

"Fuck!"
I say to myself.
"Can I do this?"

I jump off the ledge of the familiar into the sticky sweat of a slimy world that is drip drip dripping with spores. I have gone into the translucent gills of a Destroying Angel to the place where colors become sounds, tastes twitter behind my eyeballs, and visions pop from faeries' mouths. I am in the Kingdom of Fungi. 400 million years old. 1.5 million species strong. 100,000 latin names. Amanita. Agaricus. Boletus. Cantharellula. They sing in musty wines and powerful drugs, and in the largest of known living creatures that spans thirty acres of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and is fifteen hundred years old. These fungal creatures are saprophytic, living off dead and decaying matter; parasitic, killing living hosts; and symbiotic, digesting nutrients for other living organisms.
Rising as if out of nothing and disappearing again into nothing, they charm us with questions. They dare us to taste the exotic and risk intoxication. Aphrodisiacs. Hallucinogens. Epicurean delights. The Fruits of Gods. The Buddha's last meal was mushrooms and as he lay dying he said that in his lifetime he had eaten two exquisite meals. One, the first meal after he had attained Enlightenment, and the second, this last meal served to him by a humble farmer.
The rain pounds the forest canopy. I lie on my belly and feast on brilliant orange Chanterelles.

The Decline of the Wood Thrush

A wood thrush scratches at the sun-dappled leaves of the forest floor. He stops to probe the soil for beetles, spiders, millipedes, and other small invertebrates. I watch the small, rusty colored bird with a heavily spotted chest and think about how the sweet flutelike sound of his song was once so familiar in these woods. Lately, there have been years when I have not heard it, and each spring now, I wait and wonder.

The problems of the wood thrush's decline of 48% in the last forty years points to the complexities of this interconnected planet we all inhabit. The wood thrush
is a migrant. It breeds in the forests of the eastern United States and then it flies thousands of miles south to Central America, where its range is much smaller. It is dependent on large forests that can supply the protein rich diet of insects and invertebrates that inhabit the darker reaches of the forest floor. These small creatures, in turn, are dependent on a calcium rich environment. Unfortunately, acid rain from coal fired plants, auto emissions, and other air borne pollutants leaches the calcium from the soils and there has been a decline in the food sources that the wood thrush relies upon in its northern environment. In addition, acid rain also frees up heavy metals like mercury and further pollutes the soils where it falls.

On the Central American end, where the wood thrush is called Jumping Joe, the threats come from deforestation and heavy chemical fertilizers that are used for farming. The impact of deforestation is much greater in the wintering range because there is less of it, and each acre must support about six times as many wood thrushes as a comparable acre up north.

It's been forty years since Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring, and warned that there may be a time when we have no more songbirds. It's been over 150 years since Thoreau wrote, "The thrush alone declares the immortal wealth and vigor that is in the forest."

There are moments in my life that I will never forget. One is the first time I heard a wood thrush. I was camping on the banks of the Housatonic River and I was stunned by the music of the forest that evening.

"We pave paradise and put up a parking lot." There are so many things that we lose without even realizing it.

Thanks to Audubon magazine for its great article on the wood thrush.