What This Thing Actually Is
A Nh Wild Mushroom Guide is just a collection of field notes and species information compiled for the New Hampshire area. Some are PDFs you download and print out. Others are websites or apps. The core problem they solve is the same: New Hampshire has a lot of mushrooms, most of them look nothing like the colorful illustrations in picture books, and you need something quick to tell apart a chanterelle from a fool's hat before you put it in your basket. The version I keep in my truck is a printed, spiral-bound booklet I got from the UNH Cooperative Extension. It runs about 60 pages. It covers maybe 80 species instead of the thousands that grow here. That limitation is the point. You want a guide that tells you what you can actually find without drowning you in every polypore that ever grew on a birch log. I learned this the hard way. Early on I bought a glossy $40 volume that listed 300+ species including several from southern Florida. The photo of Gyromitra esculenta was gorgeous, but it also showed a macroscopic detail that I needed to confirm the species. The book didn't have enough detail on micro features. It was a beautiful object that wasted half its pages on things I would never see in the White Mountains.
How I Use a Field Guide in Practice
I don't read it cover to cover. I look at the spore print section first. A white spore print immediately narrows things down to Amanita, Lepiota, Mycena, and a few others. A brown spore print moves you into Cortinarius, Russula, Lactarius, and similar genera. That one step cuts the decision tree down to something manageable in the field. Spore prints are the detail most people skip. You can make one with a knife blade, a piece of glass, and 30 minutes of patience. I carry a small folding spatula and a sheet of black and white cardstock in my bag. When I'm unsure, I take a cap home, gills down on the card, covered with an upside-down cup overnight. By morning the pattern tells me what I'm working with. It's not elegant. It takes time. But it works every time. The other thing I check first is habitat. A mushroom growing on wood is a completely different conversation from one growing in soil among conifers. A Boletus near a cedar is likely not the same species as a Boletus near a hardwood stand. The guide should cross-reference habitat. If yours doesn't, you're flying blind with boletes.
The One Edge Case That Almost Drove Me Crazy
Last October I found what looked like a perfect Cantharellus cibarius under hardwood leaf litter near Bethlehem. Golden color, false gills, firm flesh. I put it in my basket and checked the guide on the drive back. Page 24 had a similar-looking species called Hygrophoropsis aurantiaca, the false chanterelle. But the description said it grows under conifers. I had found mine under oak and maple. I called it out to a local mycologist and she said the guide was being too rigid about habitat. False chanoterelles do occasionally show up under hardwoods in New Hampshire, especially where conifer debris is mixed in. She told me to check the flesh color and the odor instead. True chanterelles smell faintly fruity. False ones don't. The flesh of a true chanterelle is the same golden color all the way through. False chanoterelle has a paler, whitish context inside. I went back the next day, cut one open, and confirmed. My guide's habitat note was technically correct for the species profile but practically misleading in the field. I started carrying a laminated one-page reference for species that break the standard habitat rules. It covers about a dozen tricky lookalikes that the main guide glosses over. Without that supplement I would have misidentified more than once.
Get the Full Details
Download and Access Options
The NH Division of Forests and Lands posts a free field guide on their website. The PDF is rough around the edges, missing some regional species, but it's current enough for casual foragers. The UNH Cooperative Extension has a more thorough version you can order or pick up at certain library branches. It costs about $12. There's also a free smartphone app from Wild Mushroom Guide NH that updates species lists seasonally. I don't rely on apps in the field. They fail when the battery dies or the signal drops, which is most of the time in the mountains. If you want a physical copy, the NH Field Mushroom Guide by David Arora is available at most outdoor shops in Concord and North Conway. It's not New Hampshire-specific, but it covers the region well enough. The downside is the price. It runs around $25 and some sections read like essays instead of field keys. You learn a lot, but you're paying for prose you won't use in the field.
What Beginners Miss About Identification
The first thing people get wrong is relying on color alone. Colors change when mushrooms dry out, get rained on, or age. A bright red Amanita can look washed out within hours. A blue-staining bolete might not stain at all if it's cold and wet. Color is a starting point, not a confirmation. The second thing is ignoring the smell. Many edible species have distinctive odors that the guide mentions in one sentence and most readers skip. Craterellus cornucopioides, the horn of plenty, smells faintly fruity and earthy. Some toxic Cortinarius species smell like raw potato. Smell is a diagnostic tool you already have. Just crush a bit of the cap and take a sniff. Don't lick anything. The third thing is assuming a guide covers everything. No single Nh Wild Mushroom Guide covers every species in the state. The diversity is too high. You will encounter things that aren't in your book. The workaround is learning genera, not just species. Once you understand how Amanita differs from Gyromitra in cap attachment and volva structure, you can handle unknown specimens better than someone who memorized 50 species descriptions by name.
When a Guide Fails You Completely
A field guide is not a substitute for a laboratory confirmation. If you plan to eat anything, send a sample to the New Hampshire Mycological Society or a university extension lab for verification. I had a friend who misidentified a small Cortinarius as an edible russula. The guide said both were generally safe. The species he picked was Cortinarius rubellus, the deadly webcap. The guide didn't flag it because it's rare in his area. Rare doesn't mean absent. Guides also break down with weather extremes. After a severe drought, many boletes produce very small fruiting bodies that don't match the illustrations. After heavy rain, slime molds and jelly fungi appear and confuse people who think everything is a mushroom. A guide written for average conditions won't help you in abnormal years.
My Recommendation
Get the NH Division of Forests and Lands guide first. It's free and accurate for the common species. Pair it with a basic spore print kit and a loupe. Learn to make spore prints and check odor. Build your own one-page supplement for the tricky lookalikes you encounter. And when in doubt, don't eat it. No guide is perfect. The ones that work are the ones you use repeatedly and update based on what you find in the field.
