Sherry Kay can’t remember how long she’s been hunting mushrooms or exactly when she started.

“I started doing this with my mother when I was just a child,” Kay said. “And I’m old.”

Regardless of when she started, she doesn’t plan on stopping soon. Kay, the president of the Kaw Valley Mycological Society, hosted the group’s monthly mushroom hunt Saturday despite cool temperatures and intermittent rain.

Kay and her husband of 35 years, Richard, founded the society 25 years ago. About 15 people usually show up for their monthly hunts — though the uncooperative weather, Richard said, kept the group at 10 last weekend.

Richard has a better idea of when he started hunting mushrooms because it coincides with him meeting Sherry.

“It must have been maybe 35 years ago. I just celebrated my 35th wedding anniversary and my wife was interested in foraging in the city, so I would go out on walks with her and we got more interested and we got some books and we started going out to places in the country,” he said.

He stressed that it doesn’t take the wilderness to forage, though. He said their first forays into hunting together often involved just walking around campus when Sherry was in graduate school at the University.

“You don’t have to go very far to hunt,” Richard said. “For example, the pine trees in front of Watson Library are always a good place, or the ones on the west side of Strong Hall. There’s a lot of great mushrooming right there on campus.”

Last weekend alone, the group found four mushrooms that had previously not been found in Kansas.

“It’s the rain,” Sherry said. “It brings out a lot of new and different types of mushrooms.”

Sherry said the Mycological Society often provides dried specimens for the University of Kansas herbarium, located in Bridwell Laboratory on the West Campus, in order to preserve both the mushroom specimen and the molecular genetics therein.

Two of the more popular mushrooms the group found this weekend were chanterelles, which are orange or yellow and funnel-shaped, and laetiporus, or chicken of the woods, which is said to resemble the flavor and appearance of white chicken meat when cooked.

“Chanterelle season is beginning. They are so beautiful, and we had a lovely batch. We found well over 100 on Saturday. We also found chicken of the woods; it’s bright on the top, yellow on the underside. It’s a real delicious edible mushroom.”