Mushroom Time Winding Down

Morels, commonly called “mushrooms” in our area, are considered a delicacy. The sportsmen who seek these spongy fungi are more secretive about the location of the mushrooms than big-trout specialists and turkey hunters are about their favorite spots.

I have run into numerous mushroom hunters over the years while I have been fishing or scouting for turkeys. Generally most of them give me a grunt and ease out of sight. Some probably think I am spying on them.

I have been fortunate over time. Donna enjoys morels, and often several mushroom hunters supply her with a mess or two during the spring. This spring, she enjoyed a batch of what she says are tasty gray mushrooms.

Since she has not had many mushrooms, I have been “encouraged” to come up with a few. On my fishing excursions I have taken time off to search for the morels where experts have told me to seek them. I think that just about any time I spot a dying elm tree whose bark is just beginning to slip off the trunk of the tree, I have stopped and searched in circles around the tree. I have not found even one lonely morel under any of them.

I have checked some areas where I have found a few morels in other years. These are areas with thick black loam, where mushroom hunters have told me the morels’ mycelium (equivalent of a root system) grows mushrooms annually.

It is a joke around our house that I sometimes find morels growing in our backyard. I have occasionally found them while mowing the lawn not far from my pile of firewood. Not this year.

I am not, however, willing to probe for morels under thickets of multiflora rose or other brushy undergrowth. These places are hosts to ticks, which spread dreaded Lyme disease to humans; and I am pretty much terrified by it. In addition, I know a number of sportsmen who have contracted Lyme disease, and several of them have admitted that they believe they got their tick bites while seeking morels under tick-infested thickets. Even though Donna enjoys morels, I do not believe that even the tastiest of morels is worth risking getting a tick bite and possibly Lyme disease.

Thankfully for me, morel-hunting time is winding down. The last of the morels have now sprouted, though mushroom aficionados say these large yellowish morels have the least taste of any of the morels.

On my fishing trips, I am not even considering looking for mushrooms any longer this spring.