It was ‘mushroom day’ again this season

Wild Side column: What used to be a weeklong hunt has turned into a successful day in recent years

Jun. 2, 2023 10:57 am

Birds are taking dust baths in my garden, which is unusual for May but not surprising given the dearth of rain in this and other recent springs.

State Climatologist Justin Glisan reports that (from 1991 to 2020) Iowa's average precipitation is 3.67 inches for April and 4.84 inches for May, for a combined average of 8.51 inches for the two months generally considered to be the state's morel season.

In each of the past four springs, statewide April and May precipitation has fallen well below that average with 6.2 inches in 2020, 5.37 inches in 2021, 6.81 inches in 2022 and just 4.56 inches this year.

Dry springs are good for planting corn (if not for growing it), good for ground nesting birds and good for the survival of little fish. They are less good for mushroom hunting.

In the wetter springs of yore, my friend Arthur Clark of Quasqueton and I looked forward to mushroom season, when we could expect to find morels in suitably warm, damp woodland soil from the middle of April through the middle of May.

Now we look forward to Mushroom Day, which occurred May 13 this year and May 11 in 2022.

Whenever we try to pinpoint what we know about the mysterious morel, we can't get beyond what we knew when we started hunting them together 60 years ago: that they can fruit only where their underground filaments live in the soil and that they will do so when the soil is warm and damp.

In recent springs in our neck of the woods, southern Buchanan County, whenever the soil has been warm enough — in the mid-to-upper 50s — it has been too dry, and whenever it has been damp enough it has been too cold.

With the exception, of course, of those two Mushroom Days. On May 11, 2022, we picked 290 morels beneath one giant dead elm tree. A year and two days later, we picked about that many in a nearly treeless expanse of river bottom leaf litter.

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Arthur's analytical mind led us to our most recent big strike. We had found a few morels in each of the first three known-producing spots we visited, but they always were at the lowest, dampest edge of the spot. Deducing that we should seek the lowest ground available, Arthur headed to a depression that had not yielded morels since the drought of 2012. Upon his arrival he summoned me.

There they were: fresh, brown, mid-sized morels stretching seemingly to infinity with no cover to hide their nakedness — enough to make old men giddy.

After we’d filled our mesh bags, we moved on to one last spot, which proved notable not so much for the dozen morels we found but for an unusual sighting. When Arthur went on point like his bird dog Willow, I jumped to the conclusion that we were on the threshold of a second morel bonanza. But it was a spotted fawn lying motionless in the grass.

We backed carefully away, certain the eyes of its hidden mother were upon us. Just as he had 25 years ago, the only other time we’d had such an encounter, Arthur adopted his little-used mama deer voice to compliment the fawn on adhering to her admonition to lie there quietly until she got back.