Morel hunt tests patience

By Orlan Love
The Gazette

Following skilled mushroom hunters through a public timber can be an unfulfilling experience unless you enjoy finding stubs.

My friend Arthur Clark of Quasqueton and I found ourselves in that unenviable situation last week  in a public timber in Buchanan County.

Jim Gallery of Winthrop points out a dead elm tree to Arthur Clark of Quasqueton during a previous morel hunt in southern Iowa. This particular hunt netted 23 pounds of the tasty fungi in about four hours. Photo by Orlan Love, The Gazette

Though we usually hunt on private ground, which is less likely to have been trampled by others, we opted last week to try our luck at a large and justifiably popular tract of county-owned land along the Wapsipinicon River.

Upon our arrival, we noticed a car parked near the timber but went ahead anyway on the slim hope it had been driven there by a turkey hunter.

Our hope was dashed when we arrived at the most productive part of the woods – an upland covered with large dead elms – and heard the voices of two men about 50 yards apart hollering back and forth, discussing their finds. Since we had no finds to discuss, they probably did not even know we were there.

Acknowledging their initiative in beating us to the spot, we graciously conceded that part of the timber and headed into the soggy river bottoms to seek morels around live river birches.
For more than an hour we slogged through the bottoms, examining scores of clusters of large birches, picking a morel here and another there but never enough collectively to even make our mesh bags hang straight.

You know you’re failing as a mushroom hunter when the perfume of blooming plum thickets – delightful but inedible – is the highlight of your outing.

Frustrated and discouraged, reckoning that the guys ahead of us had filled their bags and moved on, we decided to re-examine the good spot, hoping they had been less than thorough.

They really weren’t in the sense that they missed many mushrooms beneath the obvious trees. But, in what proved to be the salvation of our trip, they did overlook a few inconspicuous dead elms.

Like the morels themselves, some dead elms are visible only from a particular vantage, which is achieved as often as not through luck rather than diligence.

Lucky us, we walked right up to a pair of large, recently deceased specimens on a south-facing slope and found three dozen succulent 3-inchers that could not have been missed by anyone within 20 feet of the trees.

© Gazette Communications 2009