Bored with running, biking or hiking? Try these activities.

Mushroom foraging

“Foraging and mushroom hunting are the consummate social-distancing activity,” according to Tim Clemens, a Twin Cities foraging instructor and president of the Minnesota Mycological Society, a group devoted to the study of mushrooms and fungi. Clemens says you can hunt for edible mushrooms, berries and nuts in many state parks and wildlife management areas and even in your own backyard.

Clemens recommends a couple of books, “The Forager’s Harvest,” a guide to edible wild plants by Samuel Thayer, and “Mushrooms of the Midwest,” a fungi field guide by Michael Kuo and

Andrew Methven.

Star gazing

Smartphone apps like SkyView or Star Walk also have made it easier to figure out what you’re looking at in the night sky. Just point your device at the sky and it will tell you what you’re looking at.

Mike Shaw, an astrophotographer, also recommends the Minnesota Astronomical Society website (mnastro.org) to help plan your night viewing, or the book “Night Sky With the Naked Eye: How to Find Planets, Constellations, Satellites and Other Night Sky Wonders Without a Telescope,” by author Bob King.

Shaw, a delegate to the International Dark-Sky Association, says gazing at the night sky is something that can be done anywhere. “It just helps make a connection to the natural world,” he says.

Mountain biking

If the paved bike trails are too crowded, maybe it’s time to give mountain biking a try.

Be on the lookout for “singletrack,” or dirt trails just wide enough for one bike at a time. The trails are set up to go in one direction, so unless you’re passing or getting passed, you often won’t encounter other cyclists except at the trailhead. A mountain bike or fat-tire bike works best, but trails are available for all levels of expertise. Some people are even using electric-assist bikes designed for off-road use.

Kite flying

If organized sports have to be canceled this summer, that means a lot of fields won’t be occupied by soccer or softball games. Why not put them to use by flying a kite?

An ideal place to set a kite aloft is a wide open park field without many people or trees around. You can also try flying one from the shore over a lake, suggests Dave Herzig, board member of the Minnesota Kite Society. Watching a kite dancing in the wind is calming, Herzig says. “There seems to be something reassuring about it.”.

Bird watching

Bird-watchers traditionally used binoculars and a field guide to spot and identify the birds they’ve seen. But now there are online tools like Merlin, a free phone app developed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, that will help identify the bird you’ve seen by answering a few questions or by using a photograph you’ve taken. The website eBird.org, also run by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, has a clearinghouse of reports of sightings and birding hot spots.

Early mornings or late afternoons or evenings are the best time to watch birds, Stiteler says. And one place where she says there’s often lots of good birds but few people: cemeteries.