One of the surest ways to find out what’s happening with wild mushrooms over a broad area is to talk with a knowledgeable mushroom buyer. The best one we know is Jake, at the very south end of Coos Bay, and we stopped by on February 28, 2009 for a long-overdue visit.
As previously reported, Jake’s operation is clean and well-equipped, and there is a clear level of respect and trust between him and the pickers who bring their hard-earned hauls into his place of business to sell. Jungle George, an old friend, happened to be there, along with several other pickers who were new to us. As we try to do on a foray, we covered a lot of ground; our conversation was wide-ranging, and we went where it took us.
The overall season this past fall was very poor, as previously reported. Lots of theories exist as to why, but there was no “smoking gun;” it was just a lousy year. Chanterelles and boletes, the two main fall mushrooms around here, were never plentiful, and the lesser species followed suit. In most years, a season like that would result in significantly higher mushroom prices at all levels, but this has been no ordinary year. The depressed economy, nationally and internationally, has depressed the demand for wild mushrooms significantly. Like all delicacies, they’re never cheap, and much of the market just stops buying them when times are tough.
Jake foresees a possibility that the market itself will limit the number of mushrooms harvested next year, no matter whether the season is bountiful or not. This would result from the market’s simple refusal to buy more than a certain amount of mushrooms, whatever the price. Grocery stores and restaurants simply will not buy perishable items that they can’t sell (or they won’t be in business for long!). If they curtail buying, mushroom buyers like Jake will have to do the same.
The sweet tooth are quite distinctive.
There are still a certain number of mushrooms coming in, but the season is clearly coming to an end now, which is a month or so early. The bags are mostly all hedgehogs, both the smaller variety (Hydnum umbiculatum), and the larger “sweet tooth” type (Hydnum repandum). There are also some “yellow feet” (winter chanterelles, Cantharrellus infundibuliformis) coming in, but very atypically for that species, Jake has noticed a considerable number are wormy. The new flush of golden chanterelles in the Brookings area a couple of weeks ago did not reach northern Curry or any part of Coos Counties.
We talked at some length about licensing requirements. I have written elsewhere of my view that the effort to issue licenses and enforce that requirement is riddled with inadequacy and ineptitude. Only government agencies like the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management could come up with plans like these, in which the license fees clearly don’t even cover the cost of issuing them; worse, the licenses are issued in the most onerous and unreasonable way possible and produce no tangible benefit in terms of conservation and good harvest practices. Each little area requires its own license, which must be purchased from the area office during the hours in which they condescend to open their doors and deal with the public. Woe be unto the hapless picker who wanders across the line between a local Forest Service tract for which he is licensed, and a BLM section for which he is not. Ka-ching! If he gets caught, it is a hefty fine. Can you think of a less efficient system? If licenses are so imperative, why on earth not just have one national license, covering all federal lands? I know we’re supposed to be trying to expand employment, but I think the intent was for the expansion to be in productive employment!
One more thing about the management idiocy. Recreational harvesters – never, ever part of the problem to begin with – are absurdly limited in most places to 2 gallons in possession, and are now additionally required by law to cut in half each mushroom harvested (regardless of species), in order to prove they are not going to be sold. I couldn’t make such stuff up, folks.
A far more positive and beneficial effort by these agencies would be to address a real problem. Everyone agreed that the biggest problem they now face is the influx of groups of pickers who descend on their areas in large groups and adhere to no sensible harvest rules. Experienced individual pickers recognize that they have a vested interest in the long-term fungal health of our forests, and instinctively understand the need to tread lightly, to wander, to refrain from littering, and to self-impose limits and leave some for the future. Now we see the renewed influx of large numbers of new pickers, many of them foreign-born with no papers and limited English skills, again descending on the woods in fungal “deer drives,” leaving no mushroom unmolested or picked. Worse, there were reports of being followed to, and on occasion being driven off of, prized spots by threat or intimidation from these groups.
All of the pickers agreed that the County Sheriff’s patrols have learned where the good picking areas are, and now target them for license checks. I am assuming that there must have been a sudden, mysterious and precipitous decline in the incidence of real crime in this area that would allow our police officers the time to devote to these activities. Far more troubling, the pickers were in complete agreement that the deputies rarely if ever bother to check the large groups of primarily ethnic pickers. One picker said a cop told him, candidly “Why bother? If we arrest them and they go to jail, they’re soon released and just disappear… none of them have any I.D.” I may respect his honesty, but it’s hardly productive or fair to hassle the responsible pickers who are playing by the rules (onerous though they are), while giving a free pass to the irresponsible ones who constitute the real problem.
There wasn’t the slightest hint of bigotry or ethnic prejudice whatsoever in anything that was said by this group, so please spare me any accusations of such. Each of the pickers said that they had met good and responsible pickers of every ethnic group, and there was no resentment at all of these “good pickers” participating in the harvest. Most of the problem pickers seem to be recent arrivals, with no long experience or tradition of conservation. For them, picking and selling mushrooms is a way of surviving in this country. We all understand, and perhaps even sympathize, with that. However, that sympathy does not equate to a willingness to stand by and watch the woods trashed, the mushrooms decimated or to be threatened on land where we have every right to be.
It is in this problem that the Forest Service, the BLM and other agencies could actually make a positive difference, for a change. There should be mandatory training in responsible and sustainable harvest techniques required in order to obtain a commercial picking permit (much like a driving test), and one good new regulation would be to limit the size of any commercial group to no more than four individuals in the woods together. Think it’ll happen? Nah.
We first saw this problem arise in the more “prime areas” of northern Oregon and Washington in the nineties, and now they’re back. We discussed it in our essay on Commercial Picking, elsewhere on this site. The arguments we made then still apply. If global warming, pollution and over-development don’t kill off the mushrooms, this probably is the next logical candidate.
You can identify hedgehogs by their teeth.
For more comments on commerical mushrooming, please visit our post entitled Commerical Mushroom Picking at another location on this website.
Comments