Your back yard provides food for birds, squirrels and deer, but it also can be a source of sustenance for humans.

Dandelions, chicory, wild carrots, common primrose, mullein and some varieties of mushrooms are just a few of the edible plants that grow naturally in Norwalk's back yards, according to "Wildman" Steve Brill. And as long as they haven't been treated with pesticides, you can eat these and many others that grow in "wild and not so wild places.

"Brill believes foraging is good way to get back in touch with nature, and on a recent Sunday afternoon the naturalist led a dozen people from Norwalk and neighboring towns on a foraging tour. At the end of the day, the participants took home bags filled with mushrooms, ramps, seeds and herbs for seasoning foods and making teas.

"Foraging is a lot of fun," said Brill, "especially if you like food, nature and the outdoors. It's also a wonderful way to introduce children to nature.

"The group, which included a 4-year-old boy and his mother, met in the parking lot of the Branchville train station in Redding.

There, Brill gave a short talk on edible and poisonous mushrooms, showing examples that he'd brought in a cardboard box.

He began with "a great mushroom for beginners," a chicken mushroom. A member of the nonpoisonous polypore family, the chicken mushroom, which can be bright orange or yellow, grows in shelf-like formations at the bases of dead or living trees. Describing it as "a choice gourmet," Brill passed the mushroom around the group so everyone could take a sniff. "It smells like chicken, and its flesh looks like chicken," he said.

Brill said you can tell if this "most common and foolproof mushroom" is good for eating by how young and fresh it is. "Give it a pinch," he said. "It's called the rule of thumb." The mushroom gets tougher and can become infested with insects as it ages.

"I read a lot of books and took a lot of walks in the woods and learned," Brill replied.Brill, who gives foraging tours throughout the tn-state area, has taught courses for Queens College, the New York Botanical Garden, Outward Bound, and many other organizations. He has been featured on dozens of television and radio shows, including the Today, and LateNight with David Letterman.

Brill's tours are not only filled with information, they also contain a dose of humor. Of a small inky cap mushroom species he said, "It's not poisonous, but it's about as tasteless as some of my jokes."

Puffballs are another group of mushrooms that grow in woodlands and back yards. The white fleshed rounded fungi have one poisonous look-alike, which is easy to identify. Brill broke open the look-alike to show the difference between it and the edible species. The poisonous one was black inside. A puffball is creamy white.

Another "foolproof' mushroom is the hen-of-the-woods, a polypore with overlapping shell-shaped brown caps. The mushroom has no poisonous look-alikes and is "incredibly delicious," Brill said, as well as being healthy. "Extracts are sold in health food stores as maitake," he said, which is believed to strengthen the immune system. The mushroom must be picked when very young because it can get encrusted with grit "and you'll have to clean it for hours."

Members of the group then got into their cars and headed caravan style to a 140-acre tract of privately owned woodlands in Redding. After advising them all to tuck their pant legs into their socks so as to avoid ticks, Brill led the way to a number of edible plants.

Northern bayberry is a shrub whose leaves can be dried and used in place of bay leaves. A stand of foxtail grass yielded seeds that could be served on top of rice, and a dead-looking stalk turned out to be garlic mustard, whose pods contained hot and spicy seeds that could be put in rice or a salad.

Brill encouraged the group to smell the bayberry leaves, and he offered tastes of the spicy garlic mustard seeds. He then pointed out the silvery leaves of mullein, which can be used as a tea for coughs. He urged the foragers to feel the fuzzy leaves. "The Indians used the leaves in their moccasins to keep warm," he said.

Then it was on to the mushrooms. Brill advised the crew to spread out in the woods and search the bases of trees and areas around tree here the delicacies might he sprouting. When anyone found something of interest, Brill blew his whistle to gather the group. It quickly became apparent that 4-year-old Luke was a master at ferreting out fungi. "Steve, I found some mushrooms," he immediately called out. Luke's first discovery was a "choice gourmet" honey mushroom, but his next was a non-edible variety that Brill suggested he throw against a tree so he could got see it explode. Brill's natural affinity with children (one of the traits that his wife, Leslie, first liked about him) was apparent as Luke took his hand and walked with him. As Brill pointed out the identifying marks on a poisonous mushroom and emphasized that Luke should never put one in his mouth, Luke asked, "Steve, how'd you learn that?"

"I read a lot of books and took a lot of walks in the woods and learned," Brill replied.

Brill, who gives foraging tours throughout the tri-state area, has taught courses for Queens College, the New York Botanical Garden, Outward Bound, and many other organizations. He has been featured on dozens of television and radio shows, including the Today Show, Late Night with David Letterman and NPR's Morning Edition. He is the author of Identifying and Harvesting Edible and Medicinal Plants in Wild (and Not So Wild) Places, and The Wild Vegetarian Cookbook. He also can be hired to give private tours, including children's birthday parties and school field trips.

In the Redding woodlands, the novice foragers took their finds to Brill for identification. "That's the angel of death," he told a woman who quickly dropped the white mushroom to the ground. Brill informed her that holding a poisonous mushroom wouldn't hurt her; only ingesting it is dangerous.

Others found a blewit ("Those go for $29 a pound at the Chelsea market in Manhattan," Brill said), a cortinarius that had a cobweb-like veil on its purple-tinged gills ("It will destroy your kidneys, but it will take about two weeks."), and pear-shaped puffballs ("That's a choice mushroom.")

When a man found a bolete, Brill pointed out that the holes in it indicated the presence of insects. "You don't want to eat an insect or maggot-infested mushroom," he said. A hen-of-the-woods found by another searcher was too old and encrusted with dirt and grit.

When a large orange chicken mushroom was discovered growing in a crook at the base of a tree, Brill extracted it with a knife and distributed portions to every member of the group. "Don't eat a lot of them at first," he said. "Sometimes they can make you sick if you aren't used to them."

The day ended with the group foraging in a shaded boggy area for ramps, potent members of the leek family. In the fall, when their bulbs are largest, ramps can be used in place of shallots. Brill pointed out the dried stalks and seed heads of the ramps, and handed out a couple of spades. Others used sticks to dig out the bulbs, which often grow in clumps.