One fall over near Snoqualmie pass on a mushroom hunt I found several largish Russulas that were all torn into pieces and scattered a bit. Later I watched a Grouse as it pecked apart the same mushroom, literally pecking it to pieces. I got curious as to what was up and started investigating the mushroom of choice and several of them turned out to have large fat insect larvae in the stem and upper parts of the cap, which is what I assumed the bird was after.



Rob Sandelin

Busy ignoring birds mostly in favor of Mushrooms



From: tweeters-bounces at mailman1.u.washington.edu [mailto:tweeters-bounces at mailman1.u.washington.edu] On Behalf Of rod
Sent: Tuesday, October 8, 2013 8:42 AM
To: tweeters at u. edu
Subject: [Tweeters] Birds eating wild mushrooms






-------- Original message --------
From: "Gilbert, Roderick C CTR (US)" <roderick.c.gilbert.ctr at mail.mil <mailto:roderick.c.gilbert.ctr at mail.mil> >
Date: 10/8/2013 8:37 AM (GMT-08:00)
To: Rod Gilbert <rodgilbert1 at comcast.net <mailto:rodgilbert1 at comcast.net> >
Subject: Birds eating wild mushrooms



Tweets,



I cleaned some chanterelles over the weekend and discarded the cut stems and other cleaned parts out in the yard on the compost. I was surprised to see Stellar?s Jays happily consume many of the discarded parts and they even got into a small territorial spat over them. I?ve never seen birds eating mushrooms and wonder if this occurs much in the wild or whether the birds only took the scraps because they were chopped into small bit-sized pieces. Has anyone witnessed this or are there records of birds foraging on wild mushrooms?



Rod Gilbert,

Olympia