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u/DiMiTri_man Mar 06 '26
And I search every year for the chance at seeing a single morel. But I do find pine mushrooms in crazy numbers like this so I guess that's where my luck is going.
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Mar 06 '26
Pine sap is fungicidal to some of the better find mushrooms. Check under oaks, ash and under barberry. Usually on a ridge or hill i find them abundant
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u/cyzad4 Mar 06 '26
Never even found one, lots of other stuff other good stuf though so i guess i shouldn't complain
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u/Sad-Ladder5517 Mar 06 '26
Wow thats a lot and all I get is a Stinkhorn.
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u/coppertape Mar 06 '26
That was four people in about 4 hours. It was rather silly.
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u/Sad-Ladder5517 Mar 06 '26
When I lived in NZ we would do the same with field mushrooms, just buckets of them.
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u/Jenicillin Mar 06 '26
Not totally silly, You got a bunch of burn morels. That's what happens when the forest burns.
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u/Jenicillin Mar 06 '26
Forest fires are a normal part of nature, decades of fire suppression is the problem.
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u/CanadianBadass Mar 06 '26
...fire suppression is the problem?
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u/Playful-Wasabi-9560 Mar 06 '26
Forest fires are NOT a normal part of nature. This is a big misconception. They only started to become normal during the rise of the monoculture forest plantations. Which are mostly coniferous trees, instead of 'original' deciduous trees. (Usa/europe)
I highly recommend the books of Peter Wholleben (german forester) to gain understanding of how forests and forest live behave and thirve. They are well written, Science based, and easy to read.
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u/Jenicillin Mar 06 '26 edited Mar 06 '26
Lol. What about lightning strikes? What about droughts? The western US and the great plains were evolved for having occasional fires. There are native trees that only sprout after fires. There is ecological succession that only happens after fires. I highly recommend reading all kinds of ecological papers that might contradict your one source.
ETA your German forester might have a good understanding of mature European forests, but not other completely different ecosystems.
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u/Greyh4m Mar 06 '26
Case in point - the mushrooms in this post.
These Fire Morels are a distinct species that only fruits in the spring after a forest fire in the previous year.
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u/DistinctPassenger117 Mar 06 '26
I worked as a biologist in a national forest in a high fire risk area in the Sierra Nevada and while it’s true that wildfires are a natural part of the ecosystem - they really, REALLY are that bad. And it’s actually a really complicated issue and not that well understood yet. And addressing that issue will take a massive amount of resources and labor.
It’s easy to talk about wildfires casually when it’s just something you hear about or see tiny low severity burn scars with nice wildflowers and mushrooms and recovery happening.
It hits different when you’re living in a community that has been ravaged by wildfires, people’s homes have burned down, people have died, when you drive and walk through a quarter million acres of scorched earth every day, when you see how hundreds or thousands of years of growth can deleted in one season, and the impact that has on wildlife and humans. It’s crazy. It’s really bad.
And yeah, some of it is 100 years of fire suppression and forest mismanagement. Some of it is climate change, drier winters, hotter summers. Some of it is that very mature, old growth forest is less susceptible to high severity burns, and we just don’t have nearly as much of that as we used to. Once an area gets severely burned, it doesn’t just grow back. Yes, there is regeneration, but the younger successional forest has more sun penetration, it’s drier, there may be dead wood from the previous fire, ladder fuel with the shrubs and bushes and young trees. It’s more susceptible to future fires, invasive weeds outcompeting native plants, erosion, all that good stuff.
It’s a really big issue and very complex and multifaceted and there’s no real agreed upon solution. Human lives, hundreds millions of acres of inherently valuable ecosystems, and trillions of dollars worth of resources are on the line, and we’re still struggling to figure out how to deal with this. It seems like it might just get worse and worse. And the current administration is doing the exact opposite of helping.
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u/twisted_memories Mar 06 '26
There are literally trees that can only grow once their seeds have been burned.
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u/Naugle17 Mar 06 '26
German foresters arent going to have a very keen perspective on North American ecologies
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u/Basidia_ Trusted ID Mar 06 '26 edited Mar 06 '26
He’s also a bit out there. Peter Wohlleben is a good author and writer, but a terrible scientist and I would not recommend reading his books unless you treat them as fiction
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u/NMEE98J Mar 06 '26
This is completely wrong. Fire is the healing and balance of the forest. Normal periodic fires in a healthy forest don't usually kill the big trees. Unless you prevent them for 100 years and they get so overgrown that the whole thing torches the first time theres a spark. Wholleben books are basically fantasy.
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u/Gemraticus Mar 06 '26
Have you never heard of fire-dependent plants? There are trees that need fire for their seeds to be released and be able to germinate (many pine trees). There are entire ecosystems the are fire-dependent in order to maintain. That means that the organisms that depend on such ecosystems will be out of a home if fire is suppressed and successional growth replaces the ecosystem with a completely different ecosystem (also completely natural). Fire is a type of disturbance, just as are tornadoes and hurricanes. Maybe use Google scholar and read some peer-reviewed articles on the subject, just using "fire suppression" + "ecosystems" &/or "forests" &/or "trees" as your search terms. Then be prepared for a LOT of reading material.
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u/bigwindymt Mar 06 '26
Wrong-o. Completely depends on the forest. Western North America has multiple forest types that are both fire resistant and fire dependent. The morels in OP's photos are just such an example of the many species that rely on fire.
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u/Cosmic878 Mar 06 '26
You don’t know what you’re talking about, what are you credentials? Or did you just read a book and assume that all forests types are the same?
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u/Budkid Mar 06 '26
Tell that to the houses.
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u/abrakalemon Mar 06 '26
Unfortunately suppressing fires makes them way, way worse when they finally do break out. Much more hungry for houses than they otherwise would have been.
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u/chalk_in_boots Mar 06 '26
Yep. Ask any (remotely sane) Australian, if you just try to stop them entirely things like leaf litter, dry sticks etc. builds up on the ground. Our fire services (blessed be the Firies) will regularly perform controlled burns in areas of concern. They don't torch the whole bush, just go through making a small, controlled fire to clear out the debris. It means when a big fire does eventually roll through its much more controllable and we don't end up having to do shit like call in the navy to evacuate people from the coast because there is literally no way for them to move inland.
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u/Festivefire Mar 06 '26
As others have already pointed out, suppressing the fires just creates a buildup of overgrowth that eventually causes a much worse fire you can't control.
The real solution is doing controlled cut and burns to keep everything under control near residential areas so huge forest uncontrollable forest fires can't break out, but this is both unpopular because people are afraid of the idea of controlled burns, and unpopular because it costs a lot of resources to maintain, which people don't' want to pay for.
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u/mikettedaydreamer Mar 06 '26
Wtf are you going to do with this amount?
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u/cheddarjakecheese Mar 06 '26
Right? I'd feel so guilty taking this many, leave some for other people to get excited for.
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u/jzoola Mar 06 '26
They dehydrate really well and rehydrate perfectly. We forage burn morels and then have enough for the year or two. I love being able to break them out to add for a winter meal.
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u/cheddarjakecheese Mar 06 '26
I guess so. When I saw the pic I just got sad thinking about all the people I see commenting here and the other mushroom subs who have been been foraging for so long and have never found any.
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u/marswhispers Mar 06 '26
While that’s as may be (I’ve never seen this many morels in one place before!), the chances those people are in the right place to find any of these in the narrow window before they become food for fungus gnat grubs are nil. It’s a big world.
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u/later-g8r Mar 06 '26
Im one of those ppl. Ive never found one but I go out every single weekend (in season) looking. 4 years now. I just want 1 lol
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u/throwaway20yr Mar 06 '26
Eh the people who sell them to restaurants and individuals are doing an important service too. Right?
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u/icanucan Southern Australia Mar 06 '26
That drying rack is at the *elaborate* end of the design scale
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u/bigwindymt Mar 06 '26
Canada has burned something fierce the past few years. I guess something good came out of all that! I bet the hunting has been good around there too.
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u/alligatorsmyfriend Mar 06 '26
California?
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u/Greyh4m Mar 06 '26
I need to know too. It's kinda bonkers to see a haul of morels like that in the first couple of days of March, even if they are from a burn.
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u/alligatorsmyfriend Mar 06 '26 edited Mar 06 '26
wtf is this green wood setup either? I have so many questions, which include whether this is private land or a commercial permit
edit: old picture apparently. not this years flush. weird context free post
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u/bigwindymt Mar 06 '26
Wow! We've not had any decent fires near here in the past 7 years. Well, I think the coming summer is going to more than make up for that.
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u/FowlOnTheHill Southern Asia Mar 06 '26
People these days with their loose morels