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The (mushroom) hunt is on
Wild Side column: But with elms scarce in Eastern Iowa, mushroom hunters need to find alternatives
The Gazette offers audio versions of articles using Instaread. Some words may be mispronounced.
It’s humbling to realize you know next to nothing about a passion you’ve been pursuing for more than 60 years.
Especially when you once thought you had it all figured out.
It was easy to think so in the 1960s and ’70s when all you had to do to fill your bag with morels was look beneath stately elms succumbing by the millions to Dutch elm disease.
Of the estimated 77 million elms in North America in 1930, the fungal disease had killed more than three-fourths by 1989.
In those bountiful days we hurried from one dead elm to the next, never bothering to even look at the ground between them.
Since they were about the only dead trees in the timber, they were easy to spot. Most of them were mature trees that had decades to nurture mutually beneficial nutrient exchange relationships with the morels’ underground mycelium.
When the tree died, ending that relationship, the fungus sent up spore-laden fruit in a bid to relocate to a more hospitable environment. Not all dead elm trees hosted morels, of course, but those that did sometimes yielded profusions, and those big strikes made you think you knew something about mushroom hunting.
I remember writing a column probably 20 years ago when I boasted: I’ll take the dead elms and you can have the rest of the world, and we’ll see who finds the most mushrooms.
With elms, dead or alive, becomingly increasingly scarce in Eastern Iowa timbers, I would never even think such a thought today.
“There are still elms out there, but you no longer have the big ones,” said Mark Vitosh, a Department of Natural Resources forester and morel enthusiast.
Vitosh said the number of elms observed in Iowa timbers declined from 2020 to 2023, according to the most recent Forest Inventory and Analysis.
As elms continued to decline, my friend Arthur Clark and I shifted our attention to river bottoms, where morels — and the occasional big strike — could still be found among leaf litter, certain grasses and riverside shrubbery we call snake bushes — so named for the reptiles’ propensity to copulate there in the spring.
Unfortunately for us, last month’s widespread heavy rains — which could have been a boon for morel season — flooded the bottoms and put our good spots under water, leaving us at a loss for fertile territory.
It’s a thorny problem, given that most of the morels we have found appear to have transferred their affinity from elms to prickly invaders such as buckthorn and multiflora rose.
As I crawl through brambles to reach a well protected morel, I think of retired Texas ranger Augustus McRae cheating at cards to win a few moments with Lonesome Dove sex worker Lorena Wood, and I say to myself: Anyone who wouldn’t brave briars for a morel doesn’t want one bad enough.
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