Mushrooms love the rain.

That's why there's no such thing as a rain date for the Western Pennsylvania Mushroom Club.

"We get together rain or shine," said John Plischke.

Indeed, the day after the remnants of Hurricane Ivan washed through the area, nearly 200 mushroom enthusiasts were trekking through wet woods and finding a windfall.

It was the fourth annual Gary Lincoff Mid-Atlantic Mushroom Foray, held Saturday at Memorial Park Church in McCandless.

From April through October, the club organizes dozens of mushroom hunts for its nearly 500 members. Equipped with rectangular baskets and detailed field guides, fungi fans scour local forests, hoping to unearth a special 'shroom.'

"There were mushrooms all over Hartwood Acres this morning," Susan Baker, of Butler, said Saturday. Baker has been a mushroom identifier for the club for the past three years, and volunteered to lead an afternoon group through a North Park forest.

"Some years you look and look, and there's nothing, but today they're everywhere," Baker said as she poked around the stump of a tree and pulled out a pear-shaped Puff Ball mushroom.

"I got a B.O.M," yelled her husband, Peter, using club lingo for Big Old Mushroom, in other words, one that hasn't been identified.

Mushrooms have scientific Latin names, but according to Lincoff, almost every identifiable mushroom also has a variety of locally known nicknames.

"Mushroom names are changing all the time, and keeping track of them all is very hard," said Lincoff, a master mycologist who is a native of Pittsburgh and lives in New York City. As an expert in the branch of biology dealing with fungi, he has written a slew of books about mushrooms, including the "National Audubon Society's Field Guide to North American Mushrooms," and returned to the area for the forage that bears his name.

The majority of mushroom nicknames are descriptive and colorful, such as the deliciously edible Honey mushroom, known locally as the Stump mushroom.

Foragers found about 250 species during the five-hour foray, turning the church's social hall into a veritable mushroom museum and engulfing it in amusty odor. Members identify each mushroom, record their finds and post them on the club's Web site.

One of the finds was the toxic Death Angel.

"When you eat [the Death Angel mushroom], it's delicious," said Plischke, 61, of Greensburg, chairman of Saturday's foray. "For two days, you brag to all your friends about how wonderful it was, and then you get so severely ill, you'll wish you were dead. But it's too late for doctors to pump your stomach because by then it's in your bloodstream. Finally, you go into a coma and then you die. If they catch it immediately, right from the time you eat it, then the only cure is a liver and kidney transplant. And if you survive those operations, then you might live."

Other species the foragers found, such as the fleshy Chanterelle, are highly prized in French cooking, while the rock-hard Artist Conk often serves as a canvas for drawings and paintings.

Zarrin Leff, 19, of Squirrel Hill, is interested in the medicinal properties of mushrooms. He noted that the Reishi Varnished Conk is considered in China to be the "mushroom of immortality" and is used to make a therapeutic tea.

John Plischke III had the greatest find of the day, presenting the group with a wynnea sparassoides, a mushroom so rare that it has been found only a handful of times in the United States, according to David Miller, professor of biology and mycology at Oberlin College in Ohio. Some mushrooms appear only every 10 to 30 years, explained Miller, who attended the foray.

When it comes to eating fungi -- the senior Plischke noted that mushrooms are not plants -- people usually love them or hate them.

"I hated mushrooms when I was a kid," said Plischke, laughing at the way his life now revolves around them.

His daughter, Sheryl Kustra, makes delicious dishes with mushrooms but refuses to eat them. "I don't like mushrooms, but I do like to hunt for them," said Kustra, acknowledging that finding fungi and organizing forays is a family affair.

Kustra was one of the cooks who created a feast for the foragers, along with her husband, John; her mother, Becky Plischke; and her sister-in-law, Kim Plischke. With several other cooks, they prepared about 20 dishes, featuring items ranging from marinated Hen-of-the-Woods, a rippled mushroom that tastes like chicken, to Candy Cap coffee cake, which was made with a sweet, maple syrup-flavored mushroom, dried and ground fine.

Tom Volk, a master mycologist from the University of Wisconsin who attended the foray, noted the importance of mushrooms and other fungi.

"Without fungi, there would be no plants on land because 90 percent of all plants have fungi associated with their root systems," he said.

Of more than 2 million species of mushrooms, about 70,000 have so far been identified.

"It's an exciting field for a scientist," Volk said, "because there's still so much left to discover."

As for the wynnea sparassoides, it won't wind up on anyone's plate. Volk said he is sending the mushroom to Harvard University for further study.

For more information about the Western Pennsylvania Mushroom Club, visit its Web site at www.wpamushroomclub.org or call John Plischke at 724-834-2358.