Rejoice, morel mushroom hunters! There is already fungus among us

When other families were hunting for Easter eggs over the weekend, Amber Thomas and her children hiked through Weston State Park searching for treats of a different type.

“You hunt Easter eggs, we hunt mushrooms!!” she posted to her Facebook page with a photo of her 7-year-old son, Kylan, holding one of his little gray finds.

Because of another mild winter, the morel season is off to an early start this year, said Ron Cook, who lives in the Northland and runs the popular Facebook page “Missouri Morel Hunting.”

The state’s first confirmed find of the season, according to Cook’s map, came on March 12 in St. Louis County. He’s been busy updating the map with all the “gets” from the Easter weekend.

Rain, sleet, or snow “couldn’t keep you guys/gals out of the woods this weekend,” he wrote to his enthusiastic following of “shroomers,” more than 45,000 now.

The hunting season typically starts around the end of the first week of April and runs through the first weekend in May, he said.

“But with global warming and stuff like that, two out of the past three years they’ve been coming a couple to three weeks early,” said Cook, who drives a truck for a living.

“I think a couple of years ago we started finding them in southern counties in Missouri by the third week in March. And this year we were finding them by the second week of March. We’re already well up into the northern counties now.”

On March 21, a hunter posted a photo of gray morels no bigger than baby fingers popping up out of the soil somewhere in Clay County. Morels have been seen in Jackson County as well.

If warmer weather prevails in the coming days, Cook expects the next couple of weeks to bring on an explosion of morels across the state.

“We really weren’t expecting to find anything,” said Thomas of Savannah, Mo., who has taken her three children, ages 4 to 9, into the woods hunting morels since they were babies.

“We found five small grays, and it’s still pretty early in the year for northwestern Missouri.”

The morels start producing, Cook said, “generally when the ground temperature starts reaching 55 degrees at around 4, 6 inches of soil depth. That’s why with the milder winters we’ve been having, the ground temperature’s been warming quicker and we’ve been getting production a lot sooner than years past.”

Cook has hunted morels most of his life.

“I started at an early age, back as far as I can walk, and I’ll be 40 next year,” he said. “It’s something that’s been passed down generations in the Cook family, just something I’ve truly been passionate about. I’ve never been great at one particular thing, but I’ve always been really good at morel hunting.”

He started his Facebook page a few years ago when he was having a hard time finding verified morel sightings in Missouri.

He’s a stickler for documentation. He asks everyone who submits a photo of their finds to include something with a date — a gas station or grocery store receipt, a newspaper clipping. Then he “pins” the find to his map.

“It was important to have absolute accuracy. The page has to have integrity so that when people are hunting and see there are morels in their county (on the map) they know they are actually there,” he said.

Things get a little competitive because everyone wants the bragging rights of finding the first morels of the season in their county, let alone the state.

Cook sees a lot of new people joining the thrill of the hunt.

“I see it every single day when I’m on there reading through the messages, that people are new beginners, and they want to learn more about it,” he said. “It’s definitely a growing hobby.

“I think it’s always been something that people really didn’t know about and the page is bringing light to morel hunting. I think when you start talking about morels or mushrooms, in any aspect, some people are grossed out by it and other people think, ‘Oh, poisonous.’

“Then they learn and they realize what a delicacy they are and how much they actually go for.”

About that “poisonous” rap.

“You definitely have to careful,” said Cook. “You know the old saying, ‘when in doubt, throw it out.’ If you’re not sure of what you’re eating, don’t take a chance because there are fungi out there that can kill you.”

The Missouri Department of Conservation offers info on which mushrooms to stay away from and shares recipes such as morels with polenta and woodland tomato sauce.

Don’t even bother to ask Cook where he hunts. “Oh, I can’t tell you that,” he said. “That is like a faux pas in the morel hunting world. We never disclose our spots.

“But I can tell you that Kansas City has a lot of wooded areas to hunt, and there’s a lot of area around here that holds morels.”

He will offer this: Start with south-facing slopes. Because they get more sunlight the soil there warms faster, which means earlier mushrooms.

Dead elm trees, sycamores, hedge trees and some pines hold morels, too, he said. People also like to hunt around creek beds.

“It’s really not difficult to do. It’s a learning experience,” he said. “The best way for people to learn is just to get out there in the woods and search. And once you find them, kind of take a step back and look at the surroundings that you’re finding them in and take notes about the vegetation that’s around.”

“There’s no better feeling than being in the woods in springtime when Mother Nature is in full bloom and really showing off her colors, and just being out there to see all that.

“And finding mushrooms on top of it when you’ve been hiking for an hour and not coming up with anything? Finally coming into a big patch of them is just an unbelievable experience and something I never really get tired of doing.”

This story was originally published March 30, 2016 at 2:09 PM with the headline "Rejoice, morel mushroom hunters! There is already fungus among us."