After a very dry October, the rain is back. A season check for Seattle's wood chips

Seattle's fall mushrooms run on rain, and October didn't bring much. Sea-Tac Airport measured 1.29 inches for the month against an average of 3.91. Even with some rain in the final week, that made it the eighth driest October since records began there in 1945, KIRO Newsradio meteorologist Ted Buehner reported. November opened dry too. Then a first Pacific system brought rain on the night of the 4th, with more storms forecast to follow through that weekend.

That matters for the two small brown mushrooms this site keeps warning about, because both of them fruit in the same damp wood chips at the same time of year.

What a late start does, and doesn't, change

Psilocybe cyanescens, the wavy cap, grows in troops on wood chips and woody debris and is especially common in cities, according to the University of British Columbia's Beaty Biodiversity Museum. It fruits in fall. Galerina marginata, which carries the same amatoxins as the death cap, likes the same rotting wood.

A dry October doesn't cancel any of that. It can mean the mushrooms show up later, in a shorter and busier stretch, at a point in the year when fewer people are thinking about them. The lookalike problem is the same in November as in October: the two can share a patch of chips, and wet, old or half-eaten specimens lose the features that tell them apart. UBC's guide points to spore print color (dark purplish-brown for the wavy cap, rusty brown for Galerina) and to a stem that blackens with age on Galerina and never turns blue. It also warns people against talking themselves into seeing blue where there's only black.

Why the stakes are high

Amatoxin poisoning is the kind that kills. The CDC's published count from last season's outbreak in northern California was 39 suspected cases between November 18, 2025 and March 17, 2026, with three liver transplants and four deaths. The CDC report identified the western destroying angel in some of those cases, and the Washington Poison Center says many involved death caps, which also grow in Washington. Neither is Galerina, but the toxin is the same.

Help is thinner on the ground now

The Puget Sound Mycological Society's free public identification clinics, which ran on Monday afternoons at the Center for Urban Horticulture from late September, have ended for the season, and its annual show was in October. The society's calendar lists no more clinics this year, so for now there's no regular walk-in table in Seattle where an expert will look at what you found.

The Washington Poison Center is open all the time, and it's the right call for anything already eaten:

• Call 1-800-222-1222, free, 24 hours a day.
• Text 206-526-2121, or use the live chat on the center's website.
• Don't wait for symptoms. With amatoxins, the first sickness usually starts 8 to 12 hours after eating, the mycological society says, so feeling fine for the first few hours tells you nothing.
• Keep the mushroom or photograph it from every side, including the base of the stem.
• Call 911 for trouble breathing, seizures or loss of consciousness.

The center has been busier than usual. It handled an average of 230 cases a day this year, up from 182 last year, across every kind of poisoning. In a May post it said calls about mushroom mix-ups were rising too.

The legal note that doesn't change with the weather

Picking psilocybin mushrooms is possessing a controlled substance in Washington, wherever they grew. Seattle treats personal possession as a lowest police priority, which isn't the same as legal. Our guide to wild psilocybin mushrooms in Washington covers the species, and our October warning explains the lookalike in more detail.

Last checked against the sources above on Nov 12, 2026. Spotted something out of date? Tell us.