Brown Spore Print Mushrooms: Rusty, Purple and Tobacco

Brown covers several different colors

The members here drop spores in several shades of brown, and each shade belongs to different mushrooms. Gill color shifts as the spores mature, so a young specimen can look paler than the spore print it will drop. Read the exact shade of the print. The word brown alone covers species with very different risks.

• rusty reddish brown: Fool's Webcap, whose gills and cobweb veil turn rusty as the spores mature
• purple brown: Sulphur Tuft, whose crowded gills shift from yellow through olive green to dark purple-brown
• tobacco brown: Deadly Fibrecap and White Fibrecap
• dark brown: Common Earthball, from a spore mass that forms inside the fruiting body
• yellowish brown to brown: Mesima and Brown Roll-Rim

Where a brown print catches a misidentification

People often mistake fool's webcap, an orange woodland mushroom, for chanterelles. Its true gills and rusty spores rule the chanterelle out. Pale caps can still drop brown spores. White fibrecap has a silky white cap and tobacco-brown spores. Its mature gill color tells you more than the white cap does.

In spring, deadly fibrecap can look like St George's mushroom. Both have pale colors, a mealy smell and grow under broadleaf trees. Its mature gill color and brick-red stains count for more than its shape. In both fibrecaps, the print and the mature gills do the work that cap color and outline cannot.

The poisons in this group

Every gilled member is poisonous, and each toxin acts in its own way. Fool's webcap contains orellanine, a toxin that heat does not break down. It can cause delayed and irreversible kidney injury, and symptoms may take days to appear. Brown roll-rim can cause vomiting and diarrhea. In rare cases it destroys red blood cells rapidly, sometimes in people who had eaten it before without the same reaction.

The two fibrecaps contain muscarine, which can bring on heavy sweating, salivation and wheezing within 15 minutes to a few hours. Deadly fibrecap has caused fatal poisoning. Sulphur tuft can cause severe vomiting, abdominal pain and diarrhea, and its bitterness is no safe taste test.

Brown prints outside the gilled mushrooms

The earthball and mesima have no gills at all. The common earthball forms its spores inside, as a mass that turns marbled purple-black, and people often confuse young earthballs with edible puffballs. It is poisonous, and a cut from top to base shows the thick skin and darkening center that reject it. Mesima is a woody medicinal bracket, so no member of this group is a plain edible.