Morel Hunt

Early or Cottonwood Morel Verpa bohemica.

       

Sometimes they hide under last year's leaves.

Sometimes they hide in the open.

Another one hiding in the open.

 

Some results of the expedition.

Deer seen while mushroom hunting. The deer only slightly visible a little left of center frame may have DHLS (Deer Hair Loss Syndrome).  

        

Better view of deer with possible DHLS.

                                      

                                      
 I went morel hunting a couple of days ago. Morels begin showing up in the early spring, just when the woods are beginning to green up. I’ve been working a lot of overtime the last week or so and time was pretty tight but I managed to squeeze in my one hunt for the year. I used to do this more often. The weather has warmed up a bit and we finally got some rain. Showers and sunbreaks seem to be the best weather to get the morels emerging.

I managed to squeeze about an hour into my busy day on my way home. The morels I am talking about are not true morels. These are early morels or cottonwood morels (Verpa bohemica) and they pretty much only grow beneath cottonwood trees.  

My dad taught me how to hunt these mushrooms. I understand his dad would eat them by the skilletfull. I also know people that have gotten sick from eating just a few. So one should take care not to overdo with these mushrooms especially if you have never eaten them before. Evidently even large quantities didn’t faze my grandpa.  Myself, I don’t have any problems because I don’t like mushrooms so I don’t eat them. Typically, I give them to someone who does like them. I only picked a few this year and gave them to my wife who had never tried them before. It turns out that she doesn’t like them either but they didn’t make her sick.

Morel hunting is a lot like Easter egg hunting except the mushrooms are light brown and well camouflaged in last year’s leaves unless they are on a large exposed white stalk. I know I left some behind because my eye is not really that good. It would probably be better if I looked for morels more often. My Uncle Ez, on the other hand, was very good at morel hunting. He was so color blind that he had to look at which light was lit in a stop light in order to tell whether he could stop or go because he couldn’t tell the colors apart. When it came to morel hunting this was a huge advantage because he was looking only for the shapes of the mushrooms and wasn’t distracted by color. I remember going to a favorite patch with my dad and my dad looking at some tire tracks in the mud and turning around in disgust pointing at the tracks and saying “That was Ez. We might as well go somewhere else ‘cause we aren’t going to find any here”.  

Mushrooms are the fruiting bodies of a much larger fungal organism in the soil. I am a aware of several studies that indicate that picking mushrooms doesn’t have a negative effect on future crops. This makes sense because, as fruiting bodies, the job of mushrooms is to spread spores - kind of like apples or berries are designed to spread seed. This process can be helped if something picks them and moves them around. A friend of mine who lived back east said where he lived, you were required to use mesh bags such as onion bags when you picked mushrooms so you would spread the spores around. With early morels you can pick a patch and go back after a few days or after a rainfall and find new ones along with old ones that you missed on the previous trip.

One way to ruin a cottonwood morel patch is to use a rake. One of our favorite patches was ruined for several years by someone who went through it with a garden rake. Evidently this disturbs the mycelium or “main body” of the mushroom in the soil. These mushrooms don’t seem to like areas that flood frequently either. My dad told me this years ago and I have found it to be true. I know of one very interesting spot where a clump of cottonwoods is half in and half out of the regular flood zone. You can find morels on the high ground in this clump but not where it floods regularly.

To some degree however these mushrooms have to be able to deal with disturbance, because disturbance is a constant thing in Northwest forests due to fires, floods, landslides and human-caused disturbances. The patch where I went this year was select logged in 1984 and I have been finding cottonwood morels here for at least 10 years. Actually there is a good chance this patch would never have existed if this spot hadn’t been logged. There are no old cottonwood stumps so the young cottonwoods here seeded into the opening created in the forest when it was logged.

I move slowly and deliberately scanning the ground while hunting cottonwood morels and don’t make a lot of noise. Just as I was getting ready to call it quits I saw several deer. The first one almost walked on top of me. I heard a twig snap and then another then I saw something out of the corner of my eye only a few yards away and just about jumped out of my skin before realizing that it was a deer.

One was shedding heavily and may have had DHLS (Deer Hair Loss Syndrome). It looked rather strange with a large patch of hair gone on its side and the hair underneath a strange yellow/orange color. I understand that this condition, while it doesn’t do the deer any good, isn’t necessarily fatal. I watched the deer for several minutes and snapped a few pictures while they browsed new growth on some salmonberry bushes.