Field Notes Specimen SPQ-1987-114
Keying by the deposit, not the cap
Thirty-seven years of mounted prints argue that color of the spore mass — rust, white, purple-black — is the most honest character a forager owns. The cap lies; the deposit does not.
I keep a drawer in the herbarium that no visitor asks about. It holds 412 spore prints dropped between the autumn of 1952 and last Thursday, each on a 4×6 card of cold-pressed Strathmore, each annotated in pencil by whichever student took the gill imprint that afternoon. The point of the drawer is not the cards. The point is what the drawer settles, every season, about how we name what we find.
Why the cap is the wrong place to begin
A field guide will tell you that Cortinarius is rust-brown, Amanita is white, Stropharia is purple-black. A field guide will not tell you that two of my graduate students, in October 1986, keyed the same C. semisanguineus as three different species across an afternoon because the caps had been rained on. We took the prints that night on the dark mounting board the lab keeps for exactly this — PRINT SPQ-1986-273 — and the rust came up the same color in all five collections. The drawer settled it in twenty minutes.
The argument I want to make is not romantic. It is procedural. A deposit dropped onto contrasting paper, given six hours and a glass cover, is a measurement. A cap photographed in oblique light is a memory. We have spent a generation training amateurs to trust the memory and apologize for the measurement, and the herbarium drawers — mine, Smith's at Michigan, the McIlvaine collection in Beltsville — quietly disagree.