Good Morel Character

If you live around here -- east central Missouri or thereabouts -- get out and go looking, because now, now, now is the one week of the year you'll find morels. Look near paths or lawns or streams or game trails or parks -- any place that the earth gets regularly disturbed, because fungi like that.

I've been patroling for a week the strip of land where I found eight morels on the property last year. Twice a day I looked. No dice. Yesterday, enjoying some spring sun, I found a game trail not too overgrown; while cutting brush this past winter I'd opened it up a bit. Brushed my way on in there with my folding stool and had a seat where I'd never sat before. This is a wooded clifftop area. And what to my wondering eyes should appear but this nice fat good-sized morel. Just one. Only one. 

Normally you'll find morels in groups. Believe me, I looked for more; there were none. I figured this was a gift from the gods feeling sorry for me for looking so hard, walking up and down, finding zero all week. Here's a glamour shot. I sauteed and ate it within the hour.

Now stop scrolling and go out and hunt!

Signs of Spring

The "secret pond" area below the cliffs, swampy at best, is LaBarque Creek floodplain, and the post-Christmas flood covered a great deal of it with sand, silt, and matted driftwood, and as I descended into my annual early-spring exploration of the area -- impassable because of mud in winter, and in summer and fall with the thorny shrubs, green and succulent, eager to rip your face off -- I didn't know whether to expect mud, water, drowned animals' bones, or what. I'd heard that the silt and sand might cover and suffocate this year's mushroom community. So I looked with hope for the Scarlet Cups (Sarcoscypha austriaca), always the first fungi of the year around here, at maximum about 5cm across. This is the only place on the property where this Sarcoscypha, with its white rickrack, grows. As usual the cups, although small, were hard to miss, fresh and vivid, growing on rotting fallen branches among last autumn's leaves. Spring is about a week early, but it couldn't come fast enough for us.

I had not spent a whole morning outside in months. I forgot what it was like to spend a  morning outside, and what a refreshment the air could be, and how pleasant the sun if I sat down and took it in, and the trees taller than I remembered. Hawks were calling; they're seeking mates right now. In the coming days I will get photos that will tell more of the post-flood story.

Pizza Cheese

Nice wet woods today, growing thickly with greenery now, showed me for the first time in life this supposedly autumn-only fungus, Philiota limonella, or yellow philiota. They're gregarious and saprobic (meaning they feed on dead wood) and their toast-colored scales also look to me like the cheese broiled on top of a pizza or tuna casserole, or that drips from a grilled-cheese sandwich. That shows you where my mind is at. These are not edible. I picked one to look beneath its cap so I could do a better mushroom I.D. As usual, if I've misidentified, please let me know.

Devil's Urns

Friend and I spent Friday searching for morels full-time. We discovered:

1) if Spring Beauty wildflowers are still blooming in the area, the soil is too cold to produce morels.

2) that poisonous red-headed false morels are the first morels to appear; the black ones are next, then the black ones with long stems and short caps; then the gold ones.

At most, the cup is an inch in diameter.

3) my morel photographs record that morels are more likely to be found in the second half of April than in the first half.

4) if turtles are active in a likely area, morels are likely.

5) that other people are better morel hunters than we are. We found none, but met another morel hunter who had found three and showed us, and my friend was insanely jealous. However, this successful hunter had

6) instead of properly cutting them from the earth with a scissors or a knife, had torn them from the earth, "roots" and all, and because of that I could tell she had not been trained in morel conservation. If there are fewer morels every year, it's because more and more people who find them are heedlessly ripping them up by the roots. Please tell everyone you know to cut the stems at ground level.

7) Devil's Urns, Urnula craterium (pictured), are delightful because they indicate conditions nearby are right for morels, but search as we might we did not find any, yet it was a perfect spring day anyhow.

Scarlet Elf Caps

Found behind the garage and marveled at: Red circlets tiny as drops of blood. They are Scarlet Cups or Scarlet Elf Caps (Sarcoscypha coccinea), mushrooms of early spring. Inedible. Found some more in the woods, tiny, beneath leafmeal. These must be the last of them, as they are often harbingers of spring. On the floral front, we are now seeing the last of the spring flowers, such as bluebells and phlox, and the first of the summer wildflowers, such as horsemint.