Hunting without guns: Mushroom hunting starts early this spring

With an early spring accompanied by unseasonably warm weather, local mushroom hunters are heading into the woods earlier than ever before in search of the edible fungi.

Typically, the popular mushrooms start popping up around Mother’s Day, but many hunters have been bringing home bags of them for more than a week.

“It’s been a crazy spring,” Rose Keast said.

Keast is an expert in all kinds of native mushrooms and said the best place to find morels is along riverbanks and creek beds where trees have grown for a while.

“You need to find woods that have been a woods for some time,” she said. “The morels need a leafy, moldy, forestry climate to grow well. If you can find where they have had elm trees die … that’s a good place to find morels too.”

Deb Karwal, a naturalist with the Montgomery County Conservation Department, warns hunters to make sure morels are actually morels.

“There are false morels out there,” she said. “They aren’t fatally toxic, but they aren’t good for you either.”

She said you can tell a fake by the stem. A real morel’s stem is hollow.

Keast lives south of Red Oak near the Coburg corner and said her land was pasture for too long, which is why morels don’t grow there.

However, she collects oodles of other kinds of edible mushrooms through the year to eat, including the Chicken Mushroom, the Hen of the Woods, the Ash Tree Bolete and the Pine Tree Bolete.

“We actually like everything we find here better than the morels,” she said.

She also likes oyster mushrooms, which she finds growing up trees.

“I found some once that were the size of a hamburger bun,” she recalls. “I breaded it and fried it and ate it like a hamburger. It was delicious.”

Anyone who finds more morels than they can eat, Keast said they can be frozen or dried.

“You can string them up and dry them to preserve them,” she said. “When you soak them in water, they swell back up and are ready to eat.”

Karwal said all the county parks including Anderson Conservation Area, Hacklebarney, Pilot Grove and Ericson Wildlife are open to hunters.