Morel Lessons

A cluster of morels in the road - not Photoshopped

A friend asked me what is the biggest surprise I had at Bull Mills and this Saturday would have to rank high on that list.  I have always thought the reason we find so few morels on our property is the rocky soil.  After two days, 7 hours and 2+ miles of slow strolling through the woods I was rewarded with just 12 morels.  Then I opened the garage to take out the ATV and found these in the gravel drive, a total of 5!

Click to enlarge

Obviously these morels weren't inhibited by the gravel drive or the compacted  soil underneath.  This is one tough species!  I shared the pictures with our chapter mycologist Mark Bower and he replied "Holy Moly."  There has always been debate among experts on how many species of the Morchella genus there are, somewhere between 3 and 30. * (Wikipedia)  I assumed with his sophisticated technical knowledge he was giving me the species name.  After all, Moley sounds a lot like another common name for them, a Molly Moocher.

In a followup email he corrected me, pointing out this was a double entendre, as Holy Moly is an expression of amazement with origins back to 1892 and popularized in comics by Billy Batson, the alter-ego of Captain Marvel.  In this case however he was referring to the fact that we found them on Good Friday, a holy day.  What a scholar!

Black Morel - Mark Bower

Being corrected by Mark is nothing new.  I sent him the picture above of the morels we found 2 weeks ago when we were out hiking with Allan and Gala.  The earliest morels are the so-called black morels and I was excited to have finally found one.   He politely educated me on my morals.  That was a typo but it probably still applies.

"The yellow morels can be pretty dark, gray, etc. The “black morels” (Morchella angusticeps) around here are pretty uncommon. The best way to differentiate - the ridges of black morels are darker than the pits; with yellow morels the pits are darker than the ridges. Here is the only black morel I have ever seen: (photo taken with film camera!!)"

Slug on a fingertip

The final lesson is to carefully clean your mushrooms both inside and out.  Barb found this cute baby slug, just over a quarter inch long when she cut open a morel.  "A few slugs and other things will eat them. But humans have probably been eating them for about as long as there have been humans."(sciencedaily.com)
Snails are part our food chain when we don't clean a mushroom thoroughly.  "These critters have about 90 calories per 100 grams of "meat," which is high in protein (12 to 16 percent) and rich in minerals." (Outdoorlife)

Note:
Charley Burwick wrote implying that the mushrooms above might have been Photoshopped into the image.  I resent the implication and assure you that those photographs were taken today with my wife as my witness, no matter what photographic crimes may have occurred at Bull Creek in the past by the Fishin Magicians.

More Morel Madness by the Fishin Magicians

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*   "True morels split off from all other fungal species 129 million years ago, during the beginning of the Cretaceous Period. Back then, mammals were primitive little things, dinosaurs still ruled the world and morels were kind of an afterthought.   This pretty much proves that dinosaurs had small brains or lacked culinary skills.  Since then, morels have evolved into 177 related species.

Based on new genetic analysis, scientists now know that morels are very old, but not at all the oldest of 1.5 million species of fungi. They are found widely around the world, probably traveled with the continents as they drifted apart, but still look pretty much the same way they did millions of years ago." (sciencedaily.com)