Photo: Dr. Gary Hunt
A morel mushroom as defined by its distinctive honeycomb cap.
Wild mushrooms are highly desirable and can bring in big bucks, but their importance to ecosystem recovery following a fire means foot traffic on burn sites must be managed, according to retired local mycologist.
“It's important to try to limit the numbers of people and I know that is so hard to do because you can't have somebody monitoring sites — we don't have enforcement of that kind," Dr. Gary Hunt said.
Hunt, will present the talk "Fire-adapted Spring Mushrooms: Morels and Many More" on Wednesday at the Big Little Science Centre for its lecture series.
Hunt is a mycologist and retired Thompson Rivers University professor in natural resource science who has studied the mushroom market.
His talk Wednesday will examine the ecology and adaptations of post wildfire mushrooms and the underground commercial activity they have sprouted.
He said wild mushrooms are so highly sought after because of the different textures, flavours and aromas they have over what can be bought at a grocery store. They are easy to preserve.
Black market mushrooms
Hunt told Castanet Kamloops the first spring after a fire in this region — usually May — a burned area will produce “hundreds of thousands of morel mushrooms.”
Morel-rich burn sites will often attract people foraging for mushrooms for their own use as well as buyers looking to resell them to restaurants.
Hunt said the economic impact of the sale of these wild mushrooms from fire sites is believed to be significant, but the extent of the resale market is unknown and unregulated.
“The amount of money that changes hands and is part of the economic impact of morels really is impossible to document because nobody tracks it all," he said.
"There have been some studies done that actually monitor how much is collected off of given sites, but, for the most part, it's the underground economy."
Hunt said morels are just one type of mushroom collected and sold, noting chanterelle and pine mushrooms are also desirable.
“There is some regulation and accounting of this picking that is starting to develop in British Columbia and the First Nations bands are kind of first out of the gate with this,” Hunt said.
He said this initiative from Indigenous bands is a good thing as it brings in revenue and keeps a tally of how many people are traversing a site.
“When things get out of hand, they can stop issuing permits and say ‘Sorry, the site is too crowded, and we can't have any more people coming here,’” Hunt said.
He said one example of this in his talk on Wednesday will be the Elephant Hill wildfire site near Cache Creek from 2018. Hunt noted the Skeetchestn band brought in $20 collecting permits for personal use pickings and $500 for buyers.
He said some buyers are known to bring in $100 a day from mushroom resales.
Hunt said the B.C. government is lagging behind U.S. states like Washington, Oregon and California which issue permits and have site monitors to regulate the market.
Important for ecosystem
Hunt said as soon as the soil cools from a wildfire fungi will grow — either because they were not killed off by the blaze or as spores that have landed on the site.
“With the release of nutrients from the burned ash and charcoal on a burn site, that's what stimulates the mushrooms to grow,” Hunt said, noting some mushroom types have evolved to specialize living off ash and charcoal.
He said the mushrooms are merely the reproductive part of the fungus — the main body of which is the mycelium, which lives inside the soil.
Hunt said that, much like a flower, picking the mushroom off a fungus doesn’t really damage the main plant, but too much foot traffic on a burn site can.
Hunt said when people trample over a site the soil can be compressed, damaging the gas exchange for the fungi, which are helping the ecosystem recover after a fire.
“The mycelium that grows in the ash helps to stabilize the soil because these microscopic threads of fungus help to aggregate soil particles together so they're held together,” Hunt said. “That makes for the best aeration and gas exchange in the soil and helps to stabilize from erosion from subsequent rain.”
Hunt said that remediation can be undone by having a lot of people walk over and trample the soil.
Rossmoore Lake, Shuswap mushroom sites
Hunt said while there will still be mushrooms to forage years after a fire, the time of most abundance is the first spring after a fire.
He told Castanet Kamloops areas in West Kelowna, the Shuswap and Lac Le Jeune area could all be prime mushroom picking regions this May given last year’s wildfire activity.
Hunt said people who go mushroom picking need to be respectful of the land and refrain from entering any private property or First Nations band territory without permission.
He also said he will discuss the need for caution when foraging to avoid eating poisonous mushrooms, but the edible morels are easy to spot by their distinctive honeycomb cap.
“You can’t confuse them with anything that’s toxic,” Hunt said. “That’s one reason why they’re a good mushroom for beginners … to go find.”
Doors open at 6:30 p.m., with the lecture starting at 7 p.m. Entry is by donation and bicycle storage will be available at the Big Little Science Centre, 548 Seymour St.
Photo: Dr. Gary Hunt
Mushroom foraging in the Elephant Hill wildfire area.
