This past Saturday I participated in my first morel hunt with fellow members of The Illinois Mycological Association in a forested area in the outskirts of Chicago. It was a great mixture of new foragers and seasoned experts. Fungal knowledge was shared freely about how to find morels as well as what other species of fungi were called. We all had a great time which culminated in finding a great number of morels at the end of our expedition.
Looking for morels or any mushroom reminds me of when a moment of insight arises. Like when I have a problem to solve, I research it, activity think about, sleep on it, and then when I’m doing something completely unrelated the solution reveals itself. Similarly when looking for morels, you must be mentally prepared, know what your looking for and where to look, but it is when I was NOT looking for them that I saw them. I would stand still, in the right spot and wait for them to reveal themselves to me.
Finding morels involves pattern recognition within the density of patterned information of the forest.
The first patterns learned are the pattern of Ash bark and what a dead elm looks like and you begin following these patterns through the forest.
Then once you see your first morel, the pattern of the cap is imprinted in your mind, and you look at the ground, hoping this pattern will jump up. The harder you look for the morel pattern on the ground, the less likely you’ll see it. I found that looking casually, like I was waiting for something else would cause them to appear.
The rush of the reward of finding one can be blinding or sometimes it can bring clarity to see the neighboring morels. But, either way, eventually my mind had to “reset” to the patterns of the Ash, Elm and Morel, cycling through all three without hanging onto any of them too tightly. My mind also wanted to find other patterns, like, that they grow in the open, but then I’d find one under a bush, or that they grow about four feet from an Ash tree, but then I’d find one nowhere near an Ash tree. Ironically, our biggest find of morels was not distinctly near the two tell-tail trees, but was in an area that was more open.
After three hours of this on Saturday, when I closed my eyes, I could see the patterns, mainly of the Ash bark and the morel cap. I found myself looking at the roadside as we drove away, unable to stop looking for them, even as I was moving too fast and too far away to possibly see them.
