Welcome to our South Dakota mycology guide! Below you will find mushroom categories filled with pictures, videos, and descriptions to help you identify fungi found near Sioux Falls, SD and surrounding areas. All photos and videos were captured locally by me, Logan Spader. If you want to skip to the short list of my favorite edible mushrooms visit TREEfool’s edible mushroom list. But remember:
I AM NOT A MYCOLOGIST! Mushrooms in this guide may be incorrectly identified. Eating wild mushrooms could lead to a painful death.
I recommend Mushrooms of the Upper Midwest by Teresa Marrone & Mushrooms Demystified by David Arora for final identification.
Cap & Stem with Gills
This category includes the most familiar mushrooms that have an obvious stem & cap with spore-bearing gills.
Cap & Stem with Pores (& Teeth)
Mushrooms must have a stem and pores such as with Boletes and Polypores.
Atypical Caps
This category includes morels and saddle mushrooms.
Shelf with Gills, Pores, or Teeth
Any mushroom growing laterally out from an object such as a tree or log.
Spherical & Club Shaped
Mushrooms shaped like a ball or baseball bat can be found in this category.
Miscellaneous
Includes cup-shaped, coral, jelly, and crust fungi along with other unique mushrooms like cedar-apple rust.
This mycology guide was started in 2021 and grows weekly. Most of the work on this website happens in the winter since I spend my summers outside photographing and identifying the mushrooms.
Visit this page -> SD Mycology Club <- if you are interested in finding friends to hunt mushrooms with! I take my kids mushroom hunting and foraging quite frequently and we always find something new. I would appreciate learning new mushrooms (and particularly pronunciations!) from other amateur mycologists in South Dakota.
Why do I do this?
If you haven’t noticed, this guide and the included videos have taken hundreds of hours of my life to build. I gain no money from this blog. Financial maximization is destroying our free time and the intrinsic joy that come from doing things we love. I have promised myself to NEVER become a paid “influencer” in the field of mycology because of this.
So why put all the work into this website? Hunting mushrooms is awesome. I love eating them, experiencing them, finding them, and photographing them. Each time I add a new mushroom to this list it forces me to learn the Latin names and grow my personal knowledge which I pass on to my kids. This website exists for me to learn mushrooms and use my many talents to help teach other people about South Dakota mycology.
Unknown – Found these tiny red mushrooms growing in woodpecker holes on a dead tree stump in late summer 2021. I would love to be pointed to a source that may help with the identification. Thanks!
Fantastic Fungi Photos 2022
If you want more wild mushroom madness go check out my foraging blog at TREEfool.com.
Logan Spader 