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PHOENIX — Mushroom hunters always get the same two questions: "Aren't you afraid of being poisoned?" and "Do you look for those (wink, wink) special mushrooms?"

They've heard all the jokes about a "fungus among us" and a "fun guy."

But that doesn't deter members of the Arizona Mushroom Club. Several times a year they get together for forays, when they comb the woods for those mysterious mycological marvels they hold so dear.

"It's an addiction," said Chantal Pascale, a retired Realtor who splits her time between Scottsdale and Pine. "It's the excitement you have when you find your first one. When we have friends over or we go to a party, I make a little chanterelle croissant and . . . people are so happy. So that's the joy of it."

For some, mushrooming is all about the thrill of the hunt. For others, it's more about the culinary pleasure of eating an unusual and tasty ingredient that they've gathered themselves.

There are other attractions.

"It's probably as much a social club as a mushroom club," said the organization's foray chairman, Terry Beckman of Phoenix. "You get out, have a nice hike in the woods. It's good people, fun picnics and you go to fun places."

The club has about 250 members, according to president Chester Leathers, a professor emeritus of microbiology at Arizona State University, where he taught for nearly three decades.

His wife, Rose Mary, a retired biology teacher, said the couple's interest in mushrooms was purely scientific at first. Then a club member sautéed some Boletus edulis and served it to them.

"We were hooked," Rose Mary said.

The club's most recent outing was to the Mogollon Rim. Before the foray started, Chester Leathers distributed releases and reminded people to keep their bearings.

"You're walking around with your head down, looking for mushrooms. It's awfully easy, even on a clear day, to get lost," he said. "That's one of the advantages of going out with a partner. If you do get lost, at least you won't have to sleep by yourself."

Pascale, a club member for about 13 years, learned about the joys of mushrooming when she was growing up in France.

Jason Sartor, a goldsmith who lives in Tempe, was exposed to mushrooming when he lived in Russia.

"People would go out on a regular basis and pick and bring their mushrooms to market," he said. "When I got back from Russia, I decided to just start poking around. I learned that there are all sorts of edible mushrooms that grow in Arizona."

Club members uniformly recommend staying away from "LBMs" — little brown mushrooms — because there are so many kinds, and they're so hard to identify.

Although some in the club are intensely interested in the science of mycology, most just want to know how to identify edible mushrooms.

The best way to get started, Beckman said, is to go out with experienced people. Books are helpful, but beginning mushroomers have to realize that there are regional differences in mushrooms and that the same mushroom can have different appearances at various times of the year or at different stages of its life cycle.

Beckman has been gathering and eating wild mushrooms for two decades. Not once has he been sickened by one.

"It's like anything else — you just have to be cautious," he said.

After 30 or 45 minutes of poking through the woods, club members gathered for a combination show-and-tell, lecture and Q&A session, presided over by Leathers.

Then it was time to move on to another site. Beckman mingled among the newbies, offering advice. He recommended that beginners not try to take on too much at a time. Go out, he said, and really learn just one or two types of mushrooms, along with their look-alikes, then add another mushroom or two every year.