Point Reyes Fungus Fairs
Bear Valley Visitor Center
For the past 6 years, we've hosted a FREE Annual Point Reyes National Seashore Fungus Fair. Amateur mycologists have been on hand to speak with visitors about mushrooms. We've also provided free lectures in the Bear Valley Visitor Center Auditorium.
The first Fungus Fair was an offshoot of the Mycoblitz, a longterm project to collect, identify and catalog the species of mushrooms at the Point Reyes National Seashore. This effort was a collaboration of PRNS, the Bay Area Mycological Society and the Department of Plant and Microbial Biology at UC Berkeley. To learn more about the Mycoblitz, follow this link...
Outdoors behind the Visitor Center, we've set up display tables, where people pore over the remarkable colors and shapes of wild mushrooms collected in the park.
We've held a wildly popular collecting foray on the day before the fair, and been amazed at the number of park visitors and local residents who have participated.
Here is a sample of our lecture schedule, from the 2011 fair:
For information about fungi at the Point Reyes National Seashore, visit the park website:
http://www.nps.gov/pore/naturescience/mushrooms.htm
Read about the 2008 Fair in the Marin Independent Journal.
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